Blog Review: May 1


Cadence's Vatsal Patel stresses the importance of having testing and training capabilities for high-bandwidth memory to prevent the entire SoC from becoming useless and points to key HBM DRAM test instructions through IEEE 1500. In a podcast, Siemens' Stephen V. Chavez chats with Anaya Vardya of American Standard Circuits about the growing significance of high density interconnect and Ultra ... » read more

Multi-Die Design Pushes Complexity To The Max


Multi-die/multi-chiplet design has thrown a wrench into the ability to manage design complexity, driving up costs per transistor, straining market windows, and sending the entire chip industry scrambling for new tools and methodologies. For multiple decades, the entire semiconductor design ecosystem — from EDA and IP providers to foundries and equipment makers — has evolved with the assu... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


President Biden announced four new Workforce Hubs to support the CHIPS Act and other initiatives, in Upstate New York, Michigan, Milwaukee, and Philadelphia. The White House also provided economic context and progress updates for the President’s workforce strategy. Samsung began mass production of its ninth-gen industry-first V-NAND chip. Along with one-terabit triple-level cell design, th... » read more

EDA Looks Beyond Chips


Large EDA companies are looking at huge new opportunities that reach well beyond semiconductors, combining large-scale multi-physics simulations with methodologies and tools that were developed for chips. Top EDA executives have been talking about expanding into adjacent markets for more than a decade, but the broader markets were largely closed to them. In fact, the only significant step in... » read more

Is There Any Hope For Asynchronous Design?


In an era when power has become a fundamental design constraint, questions persist about whether asynchronous logic has a role to play. It is a design style said to have significant benefits and yet has never resulted in more than a few experiments. Synchronous design utilizes a clock, where the clock frequency is set by the longest and slowest path in the design. That includes potential var... » read more

How To Get The Most Out Of Gate-All-Around Designs


The semiconductor industry has relied on finFETs, three-dimensional field-effect transistors with thin vertical fins, for many generations of technology. However, the industry is reaching the limits of how much finFETs can be shrunk while maintaining their speed and power benefits, which are crucial for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications. The solution is the gat... » read more

Navigating The GPU Revolution


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of GPU acceleration on mask design and production and other process technologies, with Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S; Youping Zhang, head of ASML Brion; Yalin Xiong, senior vice president and general manager of the BBP and reticle products division at KLA; and Kostas Adam, vice president of engineering at Synopsys. What f... » read more

Blog Review: April 24


Cadence's Vatsal Patel notes the factors that make high-bandwidth memory ideal for AI, such as improved bandwidth and area from vertical stacking and power reduction features like data bus inversion. Synopsys' Rob van Blommestein points to early power network analysis as a way to ensure that enough power is delivered to each transistor to mitigate potential power-related issues within the ch... » read more

How To Scale Application Security Across The Enterprise


Enterprise organizations have hundreds of developers on numerous teams in dozens of business units. They are all working on thousands of applications, releasing software in very rapid iteration cycles. The challenges of development across all these software development life cycles, business units, and organizational silos are well known, and the sheer scale of enterprise development multiplies ... » read more

Predicting And Preventing Process Drift


Increasingly tight tolerances and rigorous demands for quality are forcing chipmakers and equipment manufacturers to ferret out minor process variances, which can create significant anomalies in device behavior and render a device non-functional. In the past, many of these variances were ignored. But for a growing number of applications, that's no longer possible. Even minor fluctuations in ... » read more

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