What’s In A Name?


By Subi Kengeri Consumers continue to demand smaller, faster and more energy-efficient electronic devices, driving the semiconductor industry to accelerate development of commercially viable chips on more advanced nodes. However, these new nodes don’t just appear by magic. It takes a great deal of careful planning to develop and deliver a process technology platform that offers competitivene... » read more

LP Verification


Functional verification has been a consideration throughout the design flow for the past several process nodes. Low power verification has been more of an afterthought. That’s beginning to change, though, as the challenge of integrating IP blocks and the physical effects of shrinking wires and RC delays in interconnects begin affecting power and performance in designs. What’s becoming cl... » read more

Designing with FinFETs: The Opportunities and the Challenges


With the help of double-patterning and other advanced lithography techniques, CMOS technology continues to scale to 20-nanometer (nm) and beyond. Yet, because of their superior attributes, FinFETs are replacing planar CMOS technology as the device technology of choice at these advanced nodes. In particular, FinFETs demonstrate better results in the areas of performance, leakage and dynamic powe... » read more

Getting Ready For High-Mobility FinFETs


By Mark LaPedus The IC industry entered the finFET era in 2011, when Intel leapfrogged the competition and rolled out the newfangled transistor technology at the 22nm node. Intel hopes to ramp up its second-generation finFET devices at 14nm by year’s end, with plans to debut its 11nm technology by 2015. Hoping to close the gap with Intel, silicon foundries are accelerating their efforts t... » read more

Multicore Madness


By Mark LaPedus Smartphones and tablets are migrating towards new and faster application processors, basebands, graphics chips and memories. In the cell-phone chipset area alone, there are a multitude of options and design considerations. Some devices combine the application processor and modem on the same chip. Some are separate devices. In addition, the architectures range from single- to... » read more

Accelerating Moore’s Law


By Ed Sperling Ever since the inception of Moore’s Law, process nodes have moved forward at a rate of once every 18 to 24 months. Companies have been talking about slowing down the rate of progression as things get harder, but at least for the next couple of process nodes something very strange will occur—Moore’s Law will accelerate. The root cause is growing competition for a shrinki... » read more

FinFETs, EUV And Moore’s Law


GlobalFoundries VP Subramani Kengeri talks about progress and problems with advanced processes with Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design. [youtube vid=_Ang0I1vWdI] » read more

Making The Right Choices


FD-SOI at 28nm, or finFETs at 20/14nm? To companies looking at the cost equation, the total market opportunity for SoCs and the NRE required to get there, this is still a manageable formula. It requires lots of number crunching and some unknowns, but by the time you get done with the math it still falls within an acceptable margin of error and the choices are relatively simple. For foundries... » read more

Too Hot To Handle


By Ann Steffora Mutschler It used to be that a device could be designed to a thermal design power. The worst case power scenario would be imagined, and the device would be designed with that in mind. But those good old days are gone. Especially for consumer devices, how a device is going to behave with respect to time, or how people are going to use it, must be understood as completely a... » read more

Sprint To The Finish Line


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss future challenges, pain points, and how the supply chain is being reconfigured with Chi-Ping Hsu, senior vice president for R&D in the Silicon Realization Group at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: Has the move to 20nm processes with 14nm finFETs progressed as smoothly as everyone hop... » read more

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