Chiplets: Deep Dive Into Designing, Manufacturing, And Testing


Chiplets are a disruptive technology. They change the way chips are designed, manufactured, tested, packaged, as well as the underlying business relationships and fundamentals. But they also open the door to vast new opportunities for existing chipmakers and startups to create highly customized components and systems for specific use cases and market segments. This LEGO-like approach sounds ... » read more

Shift Left, Extend Right, Stretch Sideways


The EDA industry has been talking about shift left for a few years, but development flows are now being stretched in two additional ways, extending right to include silicon lifecycle management, and sideways to include safety and security. In addition, safety and security join verification and power as being vertical concerns, and we are increasingly seeing interlinking within those concerns. ... » read more

Improving Performance And Lowering Power In Automotive


Automotive OEMs are boosting their investments across the semiconductor ecosystem as stepping stones toward electrification and autonomy, and they are starting to encounter some of the same issues chipmakers have been wrestling with at advanced nodes — massive compute performance, thermal and power issues, reliability over extended lifetimes, and a highly diverse and geographically distribute... » read more

Analog IP Reuse


Analog integrated circuit IP is essential to how microelectronic circuits and systems interact with the environment. It enables things like signal conversion, stable power supply, and communication in state-of-the-art devices. However, designing these critical components – even though they are often a small part of complex chips – is very costly and risk-prone. And in today’s analog field... » read more

Verification And Test Of Safety And Security


Functional verification can cost as much as design, but new capabilities are piling onto an already stressed verification methodology, leaving solutions fragmented and incomplete. In a perfect world, a semiconductor device would be verified to operate according to its complete specification, and continue to operate correctly over the course of its useful life. The reality, however, is this i... » read more

Programming Processors In Heterogeneous Architectures


Programming processors is becoming more complicated as more and different types of processing elements are included in the same architecture. While systems architects may revel in the number of options available for improving power, performance, and area, the challenge of programming functionality and making it all work together is turning out to be a major challenge. It involves multiple pr... » read more

Fast Time-To-Digital Converters As Ultra-Precise Stopwatches For Quantum Technologies


Quantum technologies enable versatile novel applications in modern engineering topics such as information processing, communication or sensing. In particular, photonic quantum technologies are an innovative field of development which, based on the quantization of light, implements a qubit for example in the polarization or phase of a single photon, or in other degrees of freedom of the electrom... » read more

Chiplet Planning Kicks Into High Gear


Chiplets are beginning to impact chip design, even though they are not yet mainstream and no commercial marketplace exists for this kind of hardened IP. There are ongoing discussions about silicon lifecycle management, the best way to characterize and connect these devices, and how to deal with such issues as uneven aging and thermal mismatch. In addition, a big effort is underway to improve... » read more

Circuit Design For Industry 4.0


By Björn Zeugmann and Olaf Enge-Rosenblatt The digitalization of industry is progressing in leaps and bounds, albeit not at the same speed everywhere. In many industries, processes can be digitalized well to very well — for example, because electronic control systems can be retrofitted from analog to digital relatively easily. In some cases, new industries emerge only because processes ha... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) outlined its plan for a National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) to be created using a share of the $11 billion in funds from the CHIPS Act marked for research and development. While a large portion of the CHIPS Act investment is set to boost U.S. fabs and manufacturing capabilities, the NSTC aims to also support the design side, ... » read more

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