The Week In Review: Design


IP Cryptographic flaws have been discovered in the IEEE P1735 standard for encrypting IP and managing access rights. A team from the University of Florida found "a surprising number of cryptographic mistakes in the standard. In the most egregious cases, these mistakes enable attack vectors that allow us to recover the entire underlying plaintext IP." The researchers warn that an adversary coul... » read more

Memory Test Challenges, Opportunities


The semiconductor capital equipment market is on fire, and the memory chip test equipment sector is no different. But it is getting much more difficult on the memory side. Memory test vendors are contending with next-generation devices, such as 3D NAND flash memories, HBM2 chips, low-power double-data-rate DRAMs, graphics DRAMs, phase-change memories, magnetoresistive RAMs, and resistive RAM... » read more

Power Modeling and Analysis


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power modeling and analysis with [getperson id="11489" p_name="Drew Wingard"], chief technology officer at [getentity id="22605" e_name="Sonics"]; [getperson id="11763" comment="Tobias Bjerregaard"], chief executive officer for [getentity id="22908" e_name="Teklatech"]; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategy officer at [getentity id="22021"... » read more

Frenzy At 10/7nm


The number of chipmakers rushing to 10/7nm is rising, despite a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increased difficulty and cost of developing chips at the most advanced nodes. How long this trend continues remains to be seen. It's likely that 7/5nm will require new manufacturing equipment, tools, materials and transistor structures. Beyond that, there is no industry-accepted roadmap, m... » read more

What’s New At Hot Chips


By Jeff Dorsch & Ed Sperling Machine learning, artificial intelligence and neuromorphic computing took center stage at Hot Chips 2017 this week, a significant change from years past where the focus was on architectures that addressed improvements in speed and performance for standard compute problems. What is clear, given the focus of presentations, is that the bleeding edge of comput... » read more

Portable Stimulus Status Report


The first release of the Portable Stimulus (PS) standard is slated for early next year. If it lives up to its promise, it could be the first new language and abstraction for verification in two decades. [getentity id="22028" e_name="Accellera"] uncorked the PS Early Adopter release at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in June. The standard has been more than two years in the making by t... » read more

Modeling Of The Electrical Performance Of The Power And Ground Supply For A PC Microprocessor On A Card


The electrical characteristics of the power and ground supply of a PC microprocessor packaged in a Ball Grid Array (BGA) package mounted on a card are studied by dynamic electromagnetic field analysis. The effects of decoupling capacitors of different types and at different locations are investigated to achieve the objectives of low power and ground impedance and no or insignificant resonances ... » read more

The Secret Life Of Accelerators


Accelerator chips increasingly are providing the performance boost that device scaling once provided, changing basic assumptions about how data moves within an electronic system and where it should be processed. To the outside world, little appears to have changed. But beneath the glossy exterior, and almost always hidden from view, accelerator chips are becoming an integral part of most des... » read more

Start Your HBM/2.5D Design Today


High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is a JEDEC-defined standard, dynamic random access memory (DRAM) technology that uses through-silicon vias (TSVs) to interconnect stacked DRAM die. In its first implementation, it is being integrated with a system-on-chip (SoC) logic die using 2.5D silicon interposer technology. In June 2015, AMD introduced its Fiji processor, the first HBM 2.5D design, which comp... » read more

Architecture First, Node Second


What a difference a node makes. A couple of rather important changes have occurred in the move from 16/14 to 10/7nm (aside from more confusing naming conventions). First, companies that require more transistors—processor companies such as [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"], AMD, [getentity id="22306" comment="IBM"] and [getentity id="22676" e_name="Qualcomm"]—have come to grips with t... » read more

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