Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Companies Pearl Semiconductor launched to provide low and ultra-low noise timing products. “Pearl is a timing company developing resonator-agnostic solutions. We work with quartz crystals, MEMS resonators or whatever achieves superior performance,” said Ayman Ahmed, CEO of Pearl Semiconductor. “Current and future automotive applications demand low noise and a wide operating temperatur... » read more

Waiting For Chiplet Standards


The need and desire for chiplets is increasing, but for most companies that shift will happen slowly until proven standards are in place. Interoperability and compatibility depend on many layers and segments of the supply chain coming to agreement. Unfortunately, fragmented industry requirements may lead to a plethora of solutions. Standards always have enabled increasing specialization. ... » read more

Demand for IC Resilience Drives Methodology Changes


Applications that demand safety, security, and resilience are driving new ways of thinking about design, verification, and the long-term reliability of chips on a mass scale. The need is growing for chips that can process more data faster, over longer periods of time, and often within a shrinking power budget. That, in turn, is forcing changes at multiple levels, at the architecture, design,... » read more

Digital Transformation In Aerospace And Defense Applications


Watching the aerospace and defense verticals, one of the most impactful publications in 2020 was probably Will Roper's "There Is No Spoon: The New Digital Acquisition Reality." Using visuals from "The Matrix", which at the time was called "the first movie of the 21st century," the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics painted a picture of a "simulation ... » read more

Overcoming Next-Generation AESA Radar Design Challenges


Phased array antennas were first used in military radar systems to scan the radar beam quickly across the sky to detect planes and missiles. These systems are becoming popular for a variety of applications and new active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) are being used for radar systems in satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. As these systems are deployed in new and novel ways, size and... » read more

Blog Review: March 24


Arm's Brian Cline points to a project with GlobalFoundries to demonstrate the feasibility and readiness of high-density, face-to-face, wafer-bonded 3D stacking technologies for high performance, energy-efficient designs. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding warns that while supply chain security risks aren't new, the recent SolarWinds breach should make everyone pay much more attention to dependencies... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers and OEMs Micron will cease development of 3D XPoint, a next-generation memory technology. Micron also plans to sell a fab that produces 3D XPoint chips. For some time, Intel and Micron have co-developed 3D XPoint, which is based on phase-change memory technology. Intel sells solid-state storage drives (SSDs) using 3D XPoint. In a fab located in Utah, Micron is producing this memo... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Qualcomm finalized its acquisition of data center chip startup Nuvia with a price of $1.4 billion. Nuvia is working on a data center SoC and Arm-based CPU core it claims will lower performance per total cost of ownership by matching high performance with high efficiency and limiting maximum power to that which can be dissipated in an air-cooled environment. Qualcomm said Nuvia’s technology wo... » read more

Blog Review: March 17


Synopsys' Chris Clark considers the growing number of automotive sensors and the cost/performance tradeoffs between edge computing capability, sensor fusion, sensor degradation, monitoring, and the maintenance of the software over the lifespan of a vehicle. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out how the process of loading the bootstrap into memory has changed over the years, from hand-entered on... » read more

Designing 2.5D Systems


As more designs hit the reticle limit, or suffer from decreasing yield, migrating to 2.5D designs may provide a path forward. But this kind of advanced packaging also comes with some additional challenges. How you adapt and change your design team may be determined by where your focus has been in the past, or what you are trying to achieve. There are business, organizational, and technical c... » read more

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