Virtual Packages Improve Signal Integrity


The 112 Gb/s generation of SerDes has brought along excessive loss within the package, around 5 dBs of loss within each monolithic package. This loss markedly reduces the usefulness of these SerDes. MCM technology has progressed to where the use of 70mm packages is routine. Non-interposer MCMs easily can use 20 or more chiplets, plus large dies and passives can be used. These MCMs have low ... » read more

A Crisis In DoD’s Trusted Foundry Program?


The U.S. Department of Defense’s Trusted Foundry program is in flux due to GlobalFoundries’ recent decision to put 7nm on hold, raising national security concerns across the U.S. defense community. U.S. DoD and military/aerospace chip customers currently have access to U.S.-based “secure” foundry capacity down to 14nm, but that's where it ends. No other foundries provide similar “s... » read more

Kandou’s Glasswing IP


Introduction The growing digitalization of our society has made our lives connected and, in many aspects, easier. But the digital revolution also implies that the total amount of data processed in the world is doubling every two years or so. Electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops, satellites, servers or self-driving vehicles must cope with twice as much data, at higher speeds. Tradi... » read more

How Much Data Can Be Pushed Through Copper Wires?


As the amount of digital data grows, so do requirements on the speed of the transmission at all levels of the transmission chain—between dies in a shared package, between packaged chips inside a device, and between devices. The communication channels encountered at every stage of this communication are different in nature. Those between dies in a shared package, or between packaged chips in a... » read more

Cloud Drives Changes In Network Chip Architectures


Cloud data centers have changed the networking topology and how data moves throughout a large data center, prompting significant changes in the architecture of the chips used to route that data and raising a whole new set of design challenges. Cloud computing has emerged as the fast growing segment of the data center market. In fact, it is expected to grow three-fold in the next few years, a... » read more

The Big Blur


Chip companies, research houses, foundries—and more recently large systems companies—have been developing alternative technologies to continue scaling power and performance. It's still not obvious which of those will win, let alone survive, or what they will do to the economics of developing chips. For more than five decades, the biggest concern was scaling devices in order to save money... » read more

Enabling Cheaper Design


While the EDA industry tends to focus on cutting edge designs, where design costs are a minor portion of the total cost of product, the electronics industry has a very long tail. The further along the tail you go, the more significant design costs become as a percent of total cost. Many of those designs are traditionally built using standard parts, such as microcontrollers, but as additional... » read more

The Chiplet Race Begins


Momentum is building for the development of advanced packages and systems using so-called chiplets, but the technology faces some challenges in the market. A group led by DARPA, as well as Marvell, zGlue and others are pursuing chiplet technology, which is a different way of integrating multiple dies in a package or system. In fact, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), part... » read more

Tech Talk: HBM vs. GDDR6


Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus, talks about memory bottlenecks and why both GDDR6 and high-bandwidth memory are gaining steam and for which markets. https://youtu.be/CPqdZZooS2g     Related Video GDDR6 – HBM2 Tradeoffs (2019) What type of DRAM works best where. » read more

The Case For Chiplets


Discussion about chiplets is growing as the cost of developing chips at 10/7nm and beyond passes well beyond the capabilities of many chipmakers. Estimates for developing 5nm chips (the equivalent 3nm for TSMC and Samsung) are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars just for the NRE costs alone. Masks costs will be in the double-digit millions of dollars even with EUV. And that's assum... » read more

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