Why Chips Die


Semiconductor devices contain hundreds of millions of transistors operating at extreme temperatures and in hostile environments, so it should come as no surprise that many of these devices fail to operate as expected or have a finite lifetime. Some devices never make it out of the lab and many others die in the fab. It is hoped that most devices released into products will survive until they be... » read more

Design For Advanced Packaging


Advanced packaging techniques are viewed as either a replacement for Moore's Law scaling, or a way of augmenting it. But there is a big gap between the extensive work done to prove these devices can be manufactured with sufficient yield and the amount of attention being paid to the demands advanced packaging has on the design and verification flows. Not all advanced packaging places the same... » read more

Taming NBTI To Improve Device Reliability


Negative-bias temperature instability is a growing issue at the most advanced process nodes, but it also has proven extremely difficult to tame using conventional approaches. That finally may be starting to change. NBTI is an aging mechanism in field-effect transistors that leads to a change of the characteristic curves of a transistor during operation. The result can be a drift toward unint... » read more

Psst, Says 5G… Wanna See What My New Antenna Tech Challenge Looks Like?


5G offers incredible potential, enabling 1000X more traffic, 10X faster speeds and an increase in the device battery capacity by 10X! So why hasn’t 5G technology been rolled out yet? The benefits all sound great, but there are also some challenges that need to be addressed. 5G is destined to cause a revolution around the world with burgeoning industries like autonomous driving, internet of... » read more

Delivering Superior Throughput for EDA Verification Workloads


Perhaps no industry is more competitive than modern electronics manufacturing and chip design. As consumers, we take it for granted that electronic devices continue to get faster, cheaper, and more capable with each generation. From smart watches to industrial controls to electronic heart-rate monitors, electronics manufacturers are challenged to build smarter, more complex devices leveraging s... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 7


Arm's Shidhartha Das looks into maximizing the benefits of power delivery networks and explains a non-intrusive technique using an on-chip digital storage oscilloscope that can directly sample the power-rails to probe potential runtime bugs due to power delivery weaknesses. Synopsys' Snigdha Dua argues that scrambling is one of the most important features introduced in HDMI 2.0 and takes a l... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


M&A GlobalFoundries formed Avera Semiconductor, a wholly-owned subsidiary focused on custom ASIC designs. While Avera will use its relationship with GF for 14/12nm and more mature technologies, it has a foundry partnership lined up for 7nm. The new company's IP portfolio includes high-speed SerDes, high-performance embedded TCAMs, ARM cores and performance and density-optimized embedded SR... » read more

AI Begins To Reshape Chip Design


Artificial intelligence is beginning to impact semiconductor design as architects begin leveraging its capabilities to improve performance and reduce power, setting the stage for a number of foundational shifts in how chips are developed, manufactured and updated in the future. AI—and machine learning and deep learning subsets—can be used to greatly improve the functional control and pow... » read more

Connected Cars: From Chip To City


As the automotive industry moves closer to autonomous vehicles, ecosystem players are focusing on the infrastructure pieces needed to make autonomous technology a reality for the first adopters, which are most likely commercial fleets. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I or v2i) is a communications model that allows vehicles to share information with the components that support a country's hi... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 31


Mentor's Joe Hupcey III digs into handling memories effectively with formal through abstraction and the easiest ways to address memory-related inconclusive results. Cadence's Paul McLellan explains DARPA's CHIPS program that aims to lower semiconductor design costs through chiplet-based designs, the current status of the work, and what the next steps will be. Synopsys' Sangeeta Kulkarni c... » read more

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