Electromigration Concerns Grow In Advanced Packages


The incessant demand for more speed in chips requires forcing more energy through ever-smaller devices, increasing current density and threatening long-term chip reliability. While this problem is well understood, it's becoming more difficult to contain in leading-edge designs. Of particular concern is electromigration, which is becoming more troublesome in advanced packages with multiple ch... » read more

What Works Best For Chiplets


The semiconductor industry is preparing for the migration from proprietary chiplet-based systems to a more open chiplet ecosystem, in which chiplets fabricated by different companies of various technologies and device nodes can be integrated in a single package with acceptable yield. To make this work as expected, the chip industry will have to solve a variety of well-documented technical an... » read more

Blog Review: April 17


Siemens' Sumit Vishwakarma highlights the importance of crystal oscillators to the proper functioning of many semiconductor devices and applications, from clock signals to transmission and reception of radio waves. Cadence's Jay Domadia introduces some of the new features in GDDR7, such as a semi-independent row and column command address bus and two modes of data signaling, enabling PAM3 fo... » read more

Future-Proofing Automotive V2X


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss Vehicle-To-Everything (V2X) technology and the path to deployment with Shawn Carpenter, program director, 5G and space at Ansys; Lang Lin, principal product manager at Ansys; Daniel Dalpiaz, senior manager product marketing, Americas, green industrial power division at Infineon; David Fritz, vice president of virtual and hybrid... » read more

Architecting Chips For High-Performance Computing


The world’s leading hyperscaler cloud data center companies — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Akamai — are launching heterogeneous, multi-core architectures specifically for the cloud, and the impact is being felt in high-performance CPU development across the chip industry. It's unlikely that any these chips will ever be sold commercially. They are optimized for specific ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Applied Materials may scale back or cancel its $4 billion new Silicon Valley R&D facility in light of the U.S. government's recent announcement to reduce funding for construction, modernization, or expansion of semiconductor research and development (R&D) facilities in the United States, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. TSMC could receive up to $6.6 billion in direct funding... » read more

Memory On Logic: The Good And Bad


The chip industry is progressing rapidly toward 3D-ICs, but a simpler step has been shown to provide gains equivalent to a whole node advancement — extracting distributed memories and placing them on top of logic. Memory on logic significantly reduces the distance between logic and directly associated memory. This can increase performance by 22% and reduce power by 36%, according to one re... » read more

Using AI/ML To Minimize IR Drop


IR drop is becoming a much bigger problem as technology nodes scale and more components are packed into advanced packages. This is partly a result of physics, but it's also the result of how the design flow is structured. In most cases, AI/ML can help. The underlying problem is that moving to advanced process nodes, and now 3D-ICs, is driving current densities higher, while the power envelop... » read more

Linear Drive Optics May Reduce Data Latency


Optical and electrical are starting to cross paths at a much deeper level, particularly with the growing focus on 3D-ICs and AI/ML training in data centers, driving changes both in how chips are designed and how these very different technologies are integrated together. At the root of this shift are the power and performance demands of AI/ML. It can now take several buildings of a data cente... » read more

Running On Star Power


What can generate four times more energy than a nuclear power plant and nearly four million times more energy than burning oil or coal? Fusion energy, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. A fusion reaction happens as the result of a collision between two light atomic nuclei to form a heavier one. All of this occurs within plasma: a hot, charged gas of positive ions and free-mov... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →