Multi-Patterning EUV Vs. High-NA EUV


Foundries are finally in production with EUV lithography at 7nm, but chip customers must now decide whether to implement their next designs using EUV-based multiple patterning at 5nm/3nm or wait for a new single-patterning EUV system at 3nm and beyond. This scenario revolves around ASML’s current extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tool (NXE:3400C) versus a completely new EUV system with... » read more

Distributed Design Implementation


PV Srinivas, group director for R&D at Synopsys, talks about the impact of larger chips and increasing complexity on design productivity, why divide-and-conquer doesn’t work so well anymore, and how to reduce the number of blocks that need to be considered to achieve faster timing closure and quicker time to market. » read more

Finding Hardware Trojans


John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at OneSpin Technologies, looks at how to identify hardware Trojans in a design, why IP from different vendors makes this more complicated, and how a digital twin can provide a reference point against which to measure if a design has been compromised. » read more

Speeding Up 3D Design


2.5D and 3D designs have garnered a lot of attention recently, but when should these solutions be considered and what are the dangers associated with them? Each new packaging option trades off one set of constraints and problems for a different set, and in some cases the gains may not be worth it. For other applications, they have no choice. The tooling in place today makes it possible to de... » read more

Power Complexity On The Rise


New chip architectures and custom applications are adding significant challenges to chip design and verification, and the problems are becoming much more complex as low power is added into the mix. Power always has been a consideration in design, but in the past it typically involved different power domains that were either on, off, or in some level of sleep mode. As hardware architectures s... » read more

Accelerating Chiplets With 112G XSR SerDes PHYs


The fading of Moore’s Law and an almost exponential increase in data is challenging the semiconductor industry as never before. Indeed, zettabytes of data are constantly generated by a wide range of devices including IoT endpoints such as vehicles, wearables, smartphones and appliances. Moreover, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications are adding new ... » read more

Migrating 3D Into The Mainstream


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Business;... » read more

IP Management And Development At 5/3nm


The growing complexity of moving to new process nodes is making it much more difficult to create, manage and re-use IP. There are more rules, more data to manage, and more potential interactions as density increases, both in planar implementations and in advanced packaging. And the problems only get worse as designs move to 5nm and 3nm, and as more heterogeneous components such as accelerato... » read more

What’s The Best Advanced Packaging Option?


As traditional chip designs become more unwieldy and expensive at each node, many IC vendors are exploring or pursuing alternative approaches using advanced packaging. The problem is there are too many advanced packaging options on the table already, and the list continues to grow. Moreover, each option has several tradeoffs and challenges, and all of them are still relatively expensive. ... » read more

More Data, More Processing, More Chips


Simon Segars, CEO of Arm, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the impact of heterogeneous computing and new packaging approaches on IP, the need for more security, and how 5G and the edge will impact compute architectures and the chip industry. SE: There are a whole bunch of new markets opening up. How does Arm plan to tackle those? Segars: Luckily for us, we can design ... » read more

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