Designs Beyond The Reticle Limit


Designs continue to grow in size and complexity, but today they are reaching both physical and economic challenges. These challenges are causing a reversal of the integration trend that has provided much of the performance and power gains over the past couple of decades. The industry, far from giving up, is exploring new ways to enable designs to go beyond the reticle size, which is around 8... » read more

A Renaissance For Semiconductors


Major shifts in semiconductors and end markets are driving what some are calling a renaissance in technology, but navigating this new, multi-faceted set of requirements may cause some structural changes for the chip industry as it becomes more difficult for a single company to do everything. For the past decade, the mobile phone industry has been the dominant driver for the semiconductor eco... » read more

AMD Wants An FPGA Company, Too


AMD signed a definitive agreement to acquire Xilinx for $35 billion in stock, setting the stage for a head-to-head battle against Intel in nearly all major markets. But there's more to this acquisition than just keeping up with AMD's arch-competitor. To begin with, the acquisition has a big impact on the programmable logic market. The only pure-play FPGA vendors left are Lattice, Achronix, a... » read more

Regaining The Edge In U.S. Chip Manufacturing


The United States is developing new strategies to prevent it from falling further behind Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps even China in semiconductor manufacturing, as trade tensions and national security concerns continue to grow. For years, the U.S. has been a leader in the development of new chip products like GPUs and microprocessors. But from a chip manufacturing standpoint, the U.S. is losin... » read more

Confusion Grows Over Packaging And Scaling


The push toward both multi-chip packaging and continued scaling of digital logic is creating confusion about how to classify designs, what design tools work best, and how to best improve productivity and meet design objectives. While the goals of design teams remains the same — better performance, lower power, lower cost — the choices often involve tradeoffs between design budgets and ho... » read more

Protecting Chiplet Architectures With Hardware Security


Chiplets are gaining significant traction as they provide compelling benefits for advancing semiconductor performance, costs, and time to market. With Moore’s Law slowing, building more powerful chips translates into building bigger chips. But with chip dimensions pushing up against reticle limits, growing the size of chips is increasingly impractical. Chiplets offer a new path forward by dis... » read more

The Importance Of Chiplet Security


Chiplets are gaining significant traction as they deliver numerous benefits beyond what can be accomplished with a monolithic SoC in a time of slowing transistor scaling. However, disaggregating SoCs into multiple chiplets increases the attack surface which adversaries can exploit to penetrate safeguards to data and hardware. With chiplets, the risks of hardware-based trojans and exploits such ... » read more

The Next Wave Of Consolidation


End markets and technologies are changing, stock prices are up, and interest rates are down. Those are the necessary ingredients for acquisition binging. So why isn't much happening? The answer is that more industry consolidation is ahead, but it's all happening more slowly than the economics would suggest. Some of the reasons are obvious, others less so. The big delay is the COVID-19 pa... » read more

How Secure Is The Package?


Advanced packaging is a viable way of extending the benefits of Moore's Law without the excessive cost of shrinking everything to fit on a single die, but it also raises some issues about security for which there are no clear answers at the moment. OSATs and foundries have been working the kinks out of how to put the pieces together in the most cost-effective and reliable way for the better ... » read more

Momentum Builds For Advanced Packaging


The semiconductor industry is stepping up its efforts in advanced packaging, an approach that is becoming more widespread with new and complex chip designs. Foundries, OSATs and others are rolling out the next wave of advanced packaging technologies, such as 2.5D/3D, chiplets and fan-out, and they are developing more exotic packaging technologies that promise to improve performance, reduce p... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →