Blog Review: Dec. 20


Synopsys' Twan Korthorst explains how PDKs can help accelerate the photonic IC design process by offering building blocks such as several types of waveguides, passive devices like splitters, combiners, and filters, along with active devices such as phase shifters, detectors, semiconductor optical amplifiers, and lasers. Siemens EDA's Harry Foster examines IC and ASIC design trends, including... » read more

The March Toward Chiplets


The days of monolithic chips developed at the most advanced process nodes are rapidly dwindling. Nearly everyone working at the leading edge of design is looking toward some type of advanced packaging using discrete heterogeneous components. The challenge now is how to shift the whole chip industry into this disaggregated model. It's going to take time, effort, as well as a substantial reali... » read more

3D-IC Reliability Degrades With Increasing Temperature


The reliability of 3D-IC designs is dependent upon the ability of engineering teams to control heat, which can significantly degrade performance and accelerate circuit aging. While heat has been problematic in semiconductor design since at least 28nm, it is much more challenging to deal with inside a 3D package, where electromigration can spread to multiple chips on multiple levels. “Be... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 14


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out design and verification language adoption trends in FPGA projects, including testbench methodologies and assertion languages. Cadence's Veena Parthan finds that giving electric vehicle batteries a second life as energy storage devices can extend their useful life by 5 to 8 years, but a lack of standardization in EV batteries poses challenges. Synopsys... » read more

Variability Becoming More Problematic, More Diverse


Process variability is becoming more problematic as transistor density increases, both in planar chips and in heterogeneous advanced packages. On the basis of sheer numbers, there are many more things that can wrong. “If you have a chip with 50 billion transistors, then there are 50 places where a one-in-a-billion event can happen,” said Rob Aitken, a Synopsys fellow. And if Intel’s... » read more

IC Stresses Affect Reliability At Advanced Nodes


Thermal-induced stress is now one of the leading causes of transistor failures, and it is becoming a top focus for chipmakers as more and different kinds of chips and materials are packaged together for safety- and mission-critical applications. The causes of stress are numerous. In heterogeneous packages, it can stem from multiple components composed of different materials. “These materia... » read more

Challenges With Adaptive Control


Historically, the performance and power consumption of a system was controlled by what could be done at design time, but chips today are becoming a lot more adaptive. This has become a necessity for cutting edge nodes, but also provides a lot of additional benefits at the expense of greater complexity and verification challenges. Design margins are a tradeoff between performance and yield. C... » read more

Advanced Auto-Routing For TSMC InFO Technologies


At the recent TSMC OIP Symposium, John Park presented 'Advanced Auto-Routing for TSMC InFO Technologies.' InFO stands for "integrated fanout" and is the lower performance, lower complexity technology for advanced packaging. For details of TSMC's whole packaging portfolio, see my post TSMC OIP: 3DFabric Alliance and 3Dblox. Here's the slide TSMC presented from that presentation on InFO. As you... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 7


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster looks at the continual maturing of FPGA functional verification processes through increasing adoption of various simulation-based and formal verification techniques. Synopsys' Stewart Williams introduces the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) project and how it can make automotive software development, testing, virtual prototyping, and validation... » read more

Tensilica DSP Code Generation Toolbox With MATLAB/Simulink


MATLAB and Simulink are widely used for modeling and simulating real-time dynamical systems. To verify the performance of MATLAB/Simulink models of these systems in a real-time application, MATLAB/Simulink models are converted to embedded C code and executed on a target processor or its equivalent Instruction Set Simulator (ISS). To deploy the generated C code in a processor, the genera... » read more

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