On-Chip Monitoring Of FinFETs


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss on-chip monitoring and its impact on power, security and reliability, including predictive maintenance. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What new problems are you seeing in design? Crosher: There are challenges emerging for companies working on advanced nodes, including scaling and trans... » read more

Explaining Adaptive Voltage Scaling And Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling


A Q&A with Moortec CTO Oliver King. What exactly do we mean by Adaptive Voltage Scaling versus Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling? Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) involves the reduction of power by changing the operating conditions within an ASIC in a closed loop. Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS), on the other hand, is a power management technique where the voltage is increased ... » read more

How Hard Is FD-SOI Design?


Fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator ([getkc id="220" kc_name="FD-SOI"]) manufacturing technology reached of point of readiness for mass production at the end of March. Along with that, it’s now clear that while there are some impacts on the design flow, those impacts are not game changers. For one thing, the tools required are the same ones currently used for 28nm planar bulk CMOS. The onl... » read more

User Case Study


Whenever more than one clock is employed in an SoC (which is all SoCs), the risk of errors from clock domain crossings (CDC) – signals (or groups of signals) that are generated in one clock domain and consumed in another – is incredibly high. Unfortunately, CDC bugs are nearly impossible to catch with conventional simulations. Thus, all too often they escape into silicon. Debugging them in ... » read more