Heterogenous Integration Creating New IP Opportunities


The design IP market has long been known for constant change and evolution, but the industry trend toward heterogenous integration and chiplets is creating some new challenges and opportunities. Companies wanting to stake out a claim in this area have to be nimble, because there will be many potential standards introduced, and they are likely to change quickly as the industry explores what is r... » read more

IP Industry Transformation


The design IP industry is developing an assortment of new options and licensing schemes that could affect everything from how semiconductor companies collaborate to how ICs are designed, packaged, and brought to market. The IP market already has witnessed a sweeping shift from a "design once, use everywhere" approach, to an "architect once, customize everywhere" model, in which IP is highly ... » read more

Always-On DSPs


There are tradeoffs between powering circuits down to save power and waking them up to respond to voice and visual commands. Prakash Madhvapathy, director of product marketing and product management at Cadence, talks about the best ways to deploy digital signal processors, why multiple DSPs are often better than just one, and what penalties there are for various approaches. » read more

How Heterogeneous ICs Are Reshaping Design Teams


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the complex interactions developing between different engineering groups as designs become more heterogeneous, with Jean-Marie Brunet, senior director for the Emulation Division at Siemens EDA; Frank Schirrmeister, senior group director for solution marketing at Cadence; Maurizio Griva, R&D Manager at Reply; and Laurent Mai... » read more

Predicting Reliability At 3/2nm And Beyond


The chip industry is determined to manufacture semiconductors at 3/2nm — and maybe even beyond — but it's unlikely those chips will be the complex all-in-one SoCs that have defined advanced electronics over the past decade or so. Instead, they likely will be one of many tiles in a system that define different functions, the most important of which are highly specialized for a particular app... » read more

Bonding Issues For Multi-Chip Packages


The rising cost and complexity of developing chips at the most advanced nodes is forcing many chipmakers to begin breaking up that chip into multiple parts, not all of which require leading edge nodes. The challenge is how to put those disaggregated pieces back together. When a complex system is integrated monolithically — on a single piece of silicon — the final product is a compromise ... » read more

Disaggregation And Smarter Chips Shift Liability For Security


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss security on chips with Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist at Ansys; Jason Oberg, CTO and co-founder of Tortuga Logic; Pamela Norton, CEO and founder of Borsetta; Ron Perez, fellow and technical lead for security architecture at Intel; and Tim Whitfield, vice president of strategy at Arm. What follows are excerpts of that conversation,... » read more

Enabling Cost-Effective, High-Performance Die-to-Die Connectivity


System advances in accelerated computing platforms such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, heterogeneous systems on chip (SoCs) for AI acceleration and high-speed networking/interconnects have all pushed chip integration to unprecedented levels. This requires more complex designs and higher levels of integration, larger die sizes and adopting the most advanced geometries as quickly as possible. Facing th... » 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

7nm Design Challenges


Ty Garibay, CTO at ArterisIP, talks about the challenges of moving to 7nm, who’s likely to head there, how long it will take to develop chips at that node, and why it will be so expensive. This also raises questions about whether chips will begin to disaggregate at 7nm and 5nm. https://youtu.be/ZqCAbH678GE » read more

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