Automotive Semiconductor March Madness 2024


As the US is amid "Basketball March Madness" – hard to ignore when you live in Silicon Valley – it also felt like the month of "Automotive Madness." We saw numerous announcements and events across the design chain, from semiconductor IP to software and IP providers to automotive OEMs. And in all of them, data-transport architectures, and with that networks-on-chips (NoCs), are critical. Ma... » read more

Interconnects Essential To Heterogeneous Integration


Designing and manufacturing interconnects is becoming more complex, and more critical to device reliability, as the chip industry shifts from monolithic planar dies to collections of chips and chiplets in a package. What was once as simple as laying down a copper trace has evolved into tens of thousands of microbumps, hybrid bonds, through-silicon vias (TSVs), and even junctions for optical ... » read more

3D-IC Intensifies Demand For Multi-Physics Simulation


The introduction of full 3D-ICs will require a simultaneous analysis of various physical effects under different workloads, a step-function change that will add complexity at every step of the design flow, expand and alter job responsibilities, and bring together the analog and digital design worlds in unprecedented ways. 3D-ICs will be the highest-performance advanced packaging option, in s... » read more

Optimizing Energy At The System Level


Power is a ubiquitous concern, and it is impossible to optimize a system's energy consumption without considering the system as a whole. Tremendous strides have been made in the optimization of a hardware implementation, but that is no longer enough. The complete system must be optimized. There are far reaching implications to this, some of which are driving the path toward domain-specific c... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. Europe's semiconductor footprint is growing in areas that previously had little association with chips. Silicon Box plans to build a panel-level foundry in northern Italy, funded in part by the Italian government. The deal is worth around €3.2 billion ($3.6B). In addition, imec will establish a specialized 300mm chip technology pilot line in M... » read more

Security Is Critical For Commercial Chiplets


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the security issues and requirements in commercial chiplet ecosystem, with Frank Schirrmeister, vice president solutions and business development at Arteris; Mayank Bhatnagar, product marketing director in the Silicon Solutions Group at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; Stephen Slater, EDA prod... » read more

Chiplet IP Standards Are Just The Beginning


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about chiplet standards, interoperability, and the need for highly customized AI chiplets, with Frank Schirrmeister, vice president solutions and business development at Arteris; Mayank Bhatnagar, product marketing director in the Silicon Solutions Group at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; Stephen S... » read more

Commercial Chiplet Ecosystem May Be A Decade Away


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the challenges of establishing a commercial chiplet ecosystem with Frank Schirrmeister, vice president solutions and business development at Arteris; Mayank Bhatnagar, product marketing director in the Silicon Solutions Group at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; Stephen Slater, EDA product mana... » read more

Accellera Preps New Standard For Clock-Domain Crossing


Part of the hierarchical development flow is about to get a lot simpler, thanks to a new standard being created by Accellera. What is less clear is how long will it take before users see any benefit. At the register transfer level (RTL), when a data signal passes between two flip flops, it initially is assumed that clocks are perfect. After clock-tree synthesis and place-and-route are perfor... » read more

NoC Development – Make Or Buy?


In the selection and qualification process for semiconductor IP, design teams often consider the cost of in-house development. Network-on-Chip (NoC) IP is no different. In “When Does My SoC Design Need A NoC?” Michael Frank and I argued that most of today’s designs – even less complex ones – can benefit from NoCs. In the blog “Balancing Memory And Coherence: Navigating Modern Chip A... » read more

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