Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance


The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

An OSAT Perspective On Semiconductor Market Trends


For the semiconductor industry, 2022 was a very interesting year. On one hand, it witnessed shortages in the supply chain. On the other hand, the macro-economic situation turned and demand for several consumer and computing devices plummeted. A trade war with China and ensuing localization of supply chain with passage of CHIPS act took shape in 2022. The auto industry is still recovering from t... » read more

PCIe 6.0 Takes Data Center Performance To The Next Level


Looking back at 2022, we saw a major update to the PCI Express (PCIe) specification. PCIe 6.0 brought with it some of the most fundamental changes yet seen by the specification, resulting in some exciting capabilities that are set to take data center performance to the next level in the years ahead. PCIe has been the interconnect of choice in computing for two decades now. Its ongoing advanc... » read more

Screening For Silent Data Errors


Engineers are beginning to understand the causes of silent data errors (SDEs) and the data center failures they cause, both of which can be reduced by increasing test coverage and boosting inspection on critical layers. Silent data errors are so named because if engineers don’t look for them, then they don’t know they exist. Unlike other kinds of faulty behaviors, these errors also can c... » read more

How The Electronics Industry Can Shape A More Sustainable, Energy-Efficient World


By Piyush Sancheti and Godwin Maben We’re already experiencing the effects of our world’s changing climate—devastating wildfires, prolonged droughts, torrential flooding, just to name a few examples. Global energy consumption is increasing, raising carbon dioxide levels and triggering extreme weather conditions. Two key forces driving these trends are the shift to hyperscale datacenter... » read more

Chip Sandwich: Electronics Chip & Photonics Chip Co-Optimized To Work Together (CalTech/Univ. of Southampton)


A technical paper titled "A 100-Gb/s PAM4 Optical Transmitter in a 3-D-Integrated SiPh-CMOS Platform Using Segmented MOSCAP Modulators" was published by researchers at CalTech and University of Southampton. "The resulting optimized interface between the two chips allows them to transmit 100 gigabits of data per second while producing just 2.4 pico-Joules per transmitted bit. This improves th... » read more

Effective Measurement Is The Key To Meeting Environmental Sustainability Goals In Data Centers


Hyperscale compute, using high-performance connected processors, continually transforms our lives as more and more applications rely on this type of compute, and at the heart of this hyperscale revolution are data centers. It is estimated that an equal amount of power is required for the airflow and cooling systems as for IT equipment. The pressure is on for organizations to create and adopt l... » read more

Securing Accelerator Blades For Datacenter AI/ML Workloads


Data centers handle huge amounts of AI/ML training and inference workloads for their individual customers. Such a vast number of workloads calls for efficient processing, and to handle these workloads we have seen many new solutions emerge in the market. One of these solutions is pluggable accelerator blades, often deployed in massively parallel arrays, that implement the latest state-of-the-ar... » read more

HBM3 In The Data Center


Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus, talks about the forthcoming HBM3 standard, why this is so essential for AI chips and where the bottlenecks are today, what kinds of challenges are involved in working with this memory, and what impact chiplets and near-memory compute will have on HBM and bandwidth.     » read more

Why Silent Data Errors Are So Hard To Find


Cloud service providers have traced the source of silent data errors to defects in CPUs — as many as 1,000 parts per million — which produce faulty results only occasionally and under certain micro-architectural conditions. That makes them extremely hard to find. Silent data errors (SDEs) are random defects produced in manufacturing, not a design bug or software error. Those defects gene... » read more

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