Damage Detection For Reliable Microelectronics


Over the past few years, the reliability and safety of electronic systems have become increasingly more important. Ongoing digitalization has made these systems an integral part of many items of daily use. This means that failures are becoming more and more critical as they can cause considerable disruption – even when they occur in consumer electronics. Today, electronics are also indispensa... » read more

Everyone’s A System Designer With Heterogeneous Integration


The move away from monolithic SoCs to heterogeneous chips and chiplets in a package is accelerating, setting in motion a broad shift in methodologies, collaborations, and design goals that are felt by engineers at every step of the flow, from design through manufacturing. Nearly every engineer is now working or touching some technology, process, or methodology that is new. And they are inter... » read more

Reliability On The Rise In IC Design


Reliability has been an important factor in the semiconductor industry for decades. A closer look reveals three main priorities: In the area of technology development and optimization, the microscopic mechanisms that lead to degradation must be identified and understood before they can be fixed. Microanalytical methods are used here as well as TCAD simulations. If it’s not possible to... » read more

Patterns And Issues In AI Chip Design


AI is becoming more than a talking point for chip and system design, taking on increasingly complex tasks that are now competitive requirements in many markets. But the inclusion of AI, along with its machine learning and deep learning subcategories, also has injected widespread confusion and uncertainty into every aspect of electronics. This is partly due to the fact that it touches so many... » read more

New Concepts Required For Security Verification


Verification for security requires new practices in both the development and verification flows, but tools and methodologies to enable this are rudimentary today. Flows are becoming more complex, especially when they span multiple development groups. Security is special in that it is pervasive throughout the development process, requiring both positive and negative verification. Positive ver... » read more

Why It’s So Difficult To Ensure System Safety Over Time


Safety is emerging as a concern across an increasing number of industries, but standards and methodologies are not in place to ensure electronic systems attain a defined level of safety over time. Much of this falls on the shoulders of the chip industry, which provides the underlying technology, and it raises questions about what more can be done to improve safety. A crude taxonomy recently ... » read more

Virtual Development Of Perception Sensor Systems


By Ron Martin and Christoph Sohrmann Over the past few years, there has been a marked expansion in research and development activities related to driver assistance systems as well as highly automated and connected driving systems. However, this has yet to translate into a higher degree of automation in the average production vehicle – especially for SAE Level 3 and above. The next step in ... » read more

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

Large-Scale Integration’s Future Depends On Modeling


VLSI is a term that conjures up images of a college textbook, but some of the concepts included in very large-scale integration remain relevant and continue to evolve, while others have fallen by the wayside. The portion of VLSI that remains most relevant for semiconductor industry is "integration," which is pushing well beyond the edges of a monolithic planar chip. But that expansion also i... » read more

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