Building Faster Chips


By Ed Sperling and Jeff Dorsch An explosion in IoT sensor data, the onset of deep learning and AI, and the commercial rollout of augmented and virtual reality are driving a renewed interest in performance as the key metric for semiconductor design. Throughout the past decade in which mobility/smartphone dominated chip design, power replaced performance as the top driver. Processors ha... » read more

The Future Of Memory (Part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss future memory with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management for memory and interface IP at [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"]; Marc Greenberg, director of product marketing at [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"]; and Lisa Minwell, [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]'s senior director of IP marketing. What follows are excerpt... » read more

The Road To 5nm


There is strong likelihood that enough companies will move to 7nm to warrant the investment. How many will move forward to 5nm is far less certain. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is big-company consolidation. There are simply fewer customers left who can afford to build chips at the most advanced nodes. Intel bought Altera. Avago bought Broadcom. NXP bought Freescale. GlobalFoundrie... » read more

Photonics Moves Closer To Chip


Silicon photonics is resurfacing after more than a decade in the shadows, driven by demands to move larger quantities of data faster, using extremely low power and with minimal heat. Until recently, much of the attention in photonics focused on moving data between servers and storage. Now there is growing interest at the PCB level and in heterogeneous multi-chip packages. Government, academi... » read more

One-On-One: Dave Hemker


Dave Hemker, CTO at [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to look at some of the key issues on the process and manufacturing side, and some of the key developments that will reshape the semiconductor industry in the future. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: One of the big discussion topics these days is [getkc id="208" commen... » read more

The Evolving Thermal Landscape


Managing heat in chips is becoming a precision balancing act at advanced nodes and with advanced packaging. While it's important to ensure that temperatures don't rise high enough to cause reliability problems, adding too much circuitry to control heat can reduce performance and lower energy efficiency. The most common approach to dealing with these issues is thermal simulation, which requir... » read more

No More Straight Lines


Shrinking features on a chip is no longer the only way forward, and in an increasing number of designs and markets, it is no longer the best way forward. Power and performance are generally better dealt with using different architectures and microarchitectures, and all of those provide the potential to reduce silicon area (cost). Cramming more transistors on a die and working around leakage... » read more

Power-Centric Chip Architectures


As traditional scaling runs out of steam, new chip architectures are emerging with power as the starting point. While this trend has been unfolding for some time, it is getting an extra boost and sense of urgency as design teams weigh a growing number of design challenges and options across a variety of new markets. Among the options are [getkc id="196" kc_name="multi-patterning"] and [getkc... » read more

Keeping The Whole Package Cool


Heat dissipation is a critical issue for designers of complex chip-stacking and system-in-package devices. The amount of heat generated by a device increases as the number of transistors goes up, but the ability to dissipate the heat depends on the package surface area. Because the goal of 3D packaging is to squeeze more transistors into less overall space, new heat dissipation issues are em... » read more

2.5D Becomes A Reality


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 2.5D and advanced packaging with Max Min, senior technical manager at [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"]; Rob Aitken, an [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"] fellow; John Shin, vice president at [getentity id="22903" e_name="Marvell"]; Bill Isaacson, director of ASIC marketing at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Frank Ferro, senior di... » read more

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