Self-Heating Issues Spread


With every new node there are additional physical effects that must be considered, but not all of them are of the same level of criticality. One that is being mentioned more frequently is self-heating. All devices consume power and when they do that, it becomes heat. "In essence, all active devices generate heat as carriers move, creating channels for current to pass through the gates," says... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Arm is expected to list solely on a U.S. stock exchange when it goes public again later this year, forgoing the London Stock Exchange for now, the BBC reports. Global investment banks expect the offering to value the company between $30 billion and $70 billion, according to Bloomberg. Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for cont... » read more

Uneven Circuit Aging Becoming A Bigger Problem


Circuit aging is emerging as a first-order design challenge as engineering teams look for new ways to improve reliability and ensure the functionality of chips throughout their expected lifetimes. The need for reliability is obvious in data centers and automobiles, where a chip failure could result in downtime or injury. It also is increasingly important in mobile and consumer electronics, w... » read more

Digital Twin Initiative Reaches Across The Cloud To The Edge


Digital twins are a hot topic of conversation across industries. Everyone wants a piece of this technology, without necessarily understanding how it fits into their day-to-day workflows. Today, digital twins are generally used as real-time digital models for validation and verification of a physical twin (model) of a product or system via simulation. Microsoft and Ansys are helping customers ... » read more

Blog Review: March 8


Synopsys' Rahul Thukral and Bhavana Chaurasia find that embedded MRAM is undergoing an uplift in utilization for low-power, advanced-node SoCs thanks to its high capacity, high density, and ability to scale to lower geometries. Siemens EDA's Chris Spear dives into the UVM Factory with a look at the  SystemVerilog Object-Oriented Programming concepts behind the factory. Cadence's Veena Pa... » read more

17 Equations That Changed The World


Mathematics has been a constant part of our lives forever and is used in many ways in our everyday lives. Created by Ian Stewart, listed on Dr. Paul Coxon’s Twitter account, and discussed on mathematics blogger Larry Philip’s site is a list of the “17 Equations that Changed the World,” many of which have been mentioned on The Big Bang TheoryTV series. However, the list is incomplete.... » read more

Standards: The Next Step For Silicon Photonics


Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved. For the past three decades, photonics largely has been an enabler for high-speed communications, a lucrative market t... » read more

Blog Review: March 1


Siemens EDA's Chris Spear explains the UVM Factory and how it can facilitate collaboration by enabling injection of new features without affecting your team. Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at efforts to ensure chiplets from different companies work together, particularly when the creating companies didn't pre-plan for those specific chiplets to work together, as well as the problems of failur... » read more

How To Build Resilience Into Chips


Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Taming Corner Explosion In Complex Chips


There is a tenuous balance between the number of corners a design team must consider, the cost of analysis, and the margins they insert to deal with them, but that tradeoff is becoming a lot more difficult. If too many corners of a chip are explored, it might never see production. If not enough corners are explored, it could reduce yield. And if too much margin is added, the device may not be c... » read more

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