tag: Moore’s Law

Good Times For Analog Designers
By Ann Mutschler - 14 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 1

By Ann Steffora Mutschler For a number of technological reasons, analog/mixed-signal design and low-power design are converging, and with that comes both challenges and opportunities. As far as challenges go, process variations at 14nm, 20nm and even 28nm have increased significantly to include DFM impacts such as layout-delay effects. On the digital side, those process changes affect... » read more

Cost Per Transistor Gets Fuzzier
By Ed Sperling - 31 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Cost per transistor always has been a major reason for chipmakers to migrate to the next process node. By shrinking transistors and adding more logic, performance usually gets a boost. Moreover, that usually provides enough engineering wiggle room to add some improvements in energy efficiency. The basic assumption that you can double the number of transistors every 24 months,... » read more

Moore’s Law Revisited
By Ed Sperling - 17 Jan, 2013 - Comments: 0

Moore’s Law, for all its re-interpretation, remains an iconic economic statement about doubling transistors over a fixed period of time—despite the fact that the time frame has changed at least twice since Gordon Moore first postulated his formula for shrinking features. Still, you don’t shrink feature sizes unless there is some economic benefit, and increasingly you don’t get an econom... » read more

No Road, No Roadmap
By Atrenta - 06 Dec, 2012 - Comments: 0

Happy holidays! It’s almost that time of year. Well-wishing and celebration are customary around now. I’ll get to that in a moment. But so are retrospectives and prognostication. Let’s focus on those for a moment. What has 2012 brought us, and what lies ahead? While there have been many technology advances and exciting new product introductions this past year, one fact shines through a... » read more

Remaking The Playing Field
By Ed Sperling - 30 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

Just a week ago the battle lines looked very well defined. ARM was fighting Intel on power, and Intel was fighting ARM on performance. One week later, ARM has cemented a deal with AMD, which will use its cores in future processors running Microsoft software. Imagination Technologies is buying MIPS, which presumably it will use to go after both ARM and Intel. And Intel has a stake in Imaginat... » read more

Facing Up To RC Delay
By Ed Sperling - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

y Ed Sperling Resistance and capacitance delays have always been someone else’s problem to solve at some fuzzy process node in the future, and for the most part manufacturers and equipment makers have done a wizard-like job of making this problem go away. They can’t make it disappear anymore, though, and beginning at 14nm and beyond RC delay is becoming more than just an annoyance. The ... » read more

Spoiled By Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 08 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Over the past 20 years, lithium ion has emerged as the predominant battery technology. While there are a few variants, it seems that for everything from smartphones to automobiles, the same basic technology is being used. Many other technologies that have come and gone over the years—nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride come to mind in the recent past, but they ar... » read more

Materials, Architectures And Gordon Moore
By Ed Sperling - 21 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

Shrinking features on bulk CMOS using planar transistors has turned the semiconductor industry from a startup industry to one of the most efficient and robust industries in the world. Each new process node increases the number of chips that can be cut out of a single wafer, literally defining economies of scale. Gordon Moore defined the direction, which certainly created a long list of chall... » read more

Experts At The Table: IC Manufacturing Challenges
By Ed Sperling - 20 Sep, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future manufacturing challenges with Carlos Mazure, chief technical officer at Soitec; Jeff Hebb, vice president of laser product marketing at Ultratech; Markus Wimplinger, corporate technology development and IP director at EV Group; and Girish Dixit, vice president of the customer integration center and process inte... » read more

The Easy Stuff Is Over
By Ed Sperling - 09 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Doomsayers have been predicting the end of Moore’s Law for the better part of a decade. While it appears that it will still remain viable for some companies—Intel and IBM already are looking into single digits of nanometers and researchers speculating about picometer designs—for most companies the race is over. Progress will still be made in moving SoCs from one node to... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →

  • Sponsors

About

Navigation

Connect With Us

Copyright ©2013-2026 SMG   |  Terms of Service  |  Privacy Policy