Blog Review: Aug. 21


Cadence's Reela Samuel explores the critical role of PCIe 6.0 equalization in maintaining signal integrity and solutions to mitigate verification challenges, such as creating checkers to verify all symbols of TS0, ensuring the correct functioning of scrambling, and monitoring phase and LTSSM state transitions. Siemens' John McMillan introduces an advanced packaging flow for Intel's Embedded ... » read more

3.5D: The Great Compromise


The semiconductor industry is converging on 3.5D as the next best option in advanced packaging, a hybrid approach that includes stacking logic chiplets and bonding them separately to a substrate shared by other components. This assembly model satisfies the need for big increases in performance while sidestepping some of the thorniest issues in heterogeneous integration. It establishes a midd... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The U.S. Department of Commerce and Texas Instruments (TI) signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms to provide up to $1.6 billion in CHIPS Act funding towards TI’s investment of over $18 billion for three 300mm semiconductor wafer fabs under construction in Texas and Utah. TI also expects to get about $6 billion to $8 billion from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Investmen... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 14


Cadence's Dimitry Pavlovsky highlights two new features in the AMBA CHI protocol Issue G update that enhance security of the Arm architecture: Memory Encryption Contexts, which allows data in each Realm in the memory to be encrypted with a different encryption key, and Device Assignment, which introduces hardware provisions to support fully coherent caches in partially trusted remote coherent d... » read more

Reusable Power Models


Power is not a new concern, and proprietary models are available for some tasks, but the industry lacks standardization. The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is hoping to help resolve that with an upcoming release of IEEE 2416, based on its Unified Power Model (UPM) work. The creation of any model is not to be taken lightly. There is a cost to its creation, verification and maintenance. ... » read more

Power Delivery Challenged By Data Center Architectures


Processor and data center architectures are changing in response to the higher voltage needs of servers running AI and large language models (LLMs). At one time, servers drew a few hundred watts for operation. But over the past few decades that has changed drastically due to a massive increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed and user demands to do it more quickly. NVIDIA's G... » read more

Voltage Drop Now Requires Dynamic Analysis


At one time a relatively infrequent occurrence, voltage drop is now a major impediment to reliability at advanced nodes. Decades ago, voltage drop was only an issue for very large and high-speed designs, where there was concern about supply lines delivering full voltage to transistors. As design margins have tightened in modern advanced designs, controlling voltage drop has become a requiremen... » read more

Powering The Future Of Flight: Designing A Hydrogen-Powered eVTOL


A large, bustling city surrounds you — crowded streets and tall buildings reaching toward the sky. You’re late for an appointment. However, instead of hopping into a car, you look above for your ride: an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicle. It is a small aircraft that takes off and lands vertically like helicopters, uses sustainable electric propulsion systems, and is inte... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 7


Synopsys' Jyotika Athavale and Randy Fish investigate the problem of silent data corruption caused by difficult-to-detect hardware defects that cause unnoticed errors in the data being processed and is becoming an increasingly pressing problem as computing scales massively at a rapid pace with the demands of AI. Siemens' Keith Felton suggests adopting physical design reuse circuits to provid... » read more

Decoding Glitch Power at the RTL Stage


In the context of analyzing digital semiconductor circuits, a glitch is any unwanted or unused signal transition, or toggle. A glitch is often a transient signal that is much shorter than a clock period and therefore is not captured by the next register stage. We also encounter full transition glitches, or transport glitches, which refer to toggles in a data path circuit that cover a full clock... » read more

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