SLM Evolves Into Critical Aspect Of Chip Design And Operation


Silicon lifecycle management has evolved greatly in the past five years, moving from novel concept to a key part of design flows at industry leaders such as NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, and others. Along with becoming a major focus for companies developing semiconductors, the use cases have expanded. While initially focused on post-silicon insights, SLM has expanded to cover the en... » read more

Achieving Successful Multi-Die Signoff


Multi-die designs leveraging 2.5D and 3D technologies are becoming crucial for various electronics applications, including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and mobile devices. These designs allow the integration of dies from different foundries and technology nodes, enhancing density and interconnect speeds beyond traditional discrete dies. However, th... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 18


Siemens’ Michael Munsey predicts that the convergence of AI, advanced packaging, and rise of software-defined products aren’t just incremental changes but will represent a fundamental shift in how we think about semiconductor design and manufacturing. Cadence's Veena Parthan points to hex-core voxels as a significant leap forward for the CFD meshing process that blends the best of struct... » read more

RISC-V Profiles Help Conformance


Experts At The Table: What's needed to be able to trust that a RISC-V implementation will work as expected across multiple designs using standard OSes. Semiconductor Engineering discussed the issue with John Min, vice president of customer service at Arteris; Zdeněk Přikryl, CTO of Codasip; Neil Hand, director of marketing at Siemens EDA (at the time of this discussion); Frank Schirrmeist... » read more

TCAD Simulation Challenges For Gate-All-Around Transistors


By Victor Moroz and Shela Aboud The transition from finFET technology to Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology helps to reduce transistor variability and resume channel length scaling. It also brings several new challenges in terms of transistor design that need to be addressed. One of the challenges is handling the thin Si layers that come with GAA technology, where Si channel thickness scale... » read more

Baby Steps Toward 3D DRAM


Flash memory has made incredible capacity strides thanks to monolithic 3D processing enabled by the stacking of more than 200 layers, which is on its way to 1.000 layers in future generations.[1] But the equally important DRAM has achieved a similar manufacturable 3D architecture. The need for a sufficiently large means of storing charge — such as a capacitor — has proved elusive. Severa... » read more

Navigating Increased Complexity In Advanced Packaging


As chips evolve toward stacked, heterogeneous assemblies and adopt more complex materials, engineers are grappling with new and often less predictable sources of variation. This is redefining what it means to achieve precision, forcing companies to rethink everything from process control and in-line metrology to materials selection and multi-level testing. These assemblies are the result of ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The 2024 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) was held this week, prompting a number of announcements from: imec: Proposed a new CFET-based standard cell architecture for the A7 node containing two rows of CFETs with a shared signal routing wall in between, allowing standard cell heights to be reduced from 4 to 3.5T, compared to single-row CFETs. Integrated indium pho... » read more

Integrating Ethernet, PCIe, And UCIe For Enhanced Bandwidth And Scalability For AI/HPC Chips


By Madhumita Sanyal and Aparna Tarde Multi-die architectures are becoming a pivotal solution for boosting performance, scalability, and adaptability in contemporary data centers. By breaking down traditional monolithic designs into smaller, either heterogeneous or homogeneous dies (also known as chiplets), engineers can fine-tune each component for specific functions, resulting in notable im... » read more

Is In-Memory Compute Still Alive?


In-memory computing (IMC) has had a rough go, with the most visible attempt at commercialization falling short. And while some companies have pivoted to digital and others have outright abandoned the technology, developers are still trying to make analog IMC a success. There is disagreement regarding the benefits of IMC (also called compute-in-memory, or CIM). Some say it’s all about reduc... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →