Edge AI And Chiplets


In the near future, more edge artificial intelligence (AI) solutions will find their way into our lives. This will be especially true in the private sector for applications in the field of voice input and analysis of camera data, which will become well-established. These application areas require powerful AI hardware to be able to process the corresponding continuously accumulating data volumes... » read more

Improving Chip Efficiency, Reliability, And Adaptability


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits' Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new models and approaches for ensuring the integrity and responsiveness of systems, and how this can be done within a given power budget and at various speeds. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are y... » read more

Holistic Die-to-Die Interface Design Methodology For 2.5-D Multi-Chip-Module Systems


More than Moore technologies can be supported by system level diversification enabled by chiplet based integrated systems within multi-chip-modules (MCM) and silicon interposer based 2.5D systems. The division of large system-on-chip dies into smaller chiplets with different technology nodes specific to the chiplet application requirement enables the performance enhancement at system level whil... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Chip design Fraunhofer IIS/EAS implemented the Bunch of Wires (BoW) standard-based interface IP from the Open Compute Project (OCP) on Samsung's 5nm technology. The effort is intended to make chiplets more feasible for products with small and medium-sized production runs and determine the need for additional uniform standards in the future, such as for die-to-die bonding. “As part of t... » read more

Predictive Health Monitoring In Functional Safety


Functional safety first became a major issue for the semiconductor industry in 2011 with the introduction of the ISO 26262 standard for implementing functional safety in the automotive industry. Before that, functional safety had already been standardized in a general manner for all industries since the end of the 1990s in IEC 61508. However, in the field of industrial automation, where the IEC... » read more

Solving Thermal Coupling Issues In Complex Chips


Rising chip and packaging complexity is causing a proportionate increase in thermal couplings, which can reduce performance, shorten the lifespan of chips, and impact overall reliability of chips and systems. Thermal coupling is essentially a junction between two devices, such as a chip and a package, or a transistor and a substrate, in which heat is transferred from one to the other. If not... » read more

Balancing Power And Heat In Advanced Chip Designs


Power and heat use to be someone else's problem. That's no longer the case, and the issues are spreading as more designs migrate to more advanced process nodes and different types of advanced packaging. There are a number of reasons for this shift. To begin with, there are shrinking wire diameters, thinner dielectrics, and thinner substrates. The scaling of wires requires more energy to driv... » read more

Chip Design Shifts As Fundamental Laws Run Out Of Steam


Dennard scaling is gone, Amdahl's Law is reaching its limit, and Moore's Law is becoming difficult and expensive to follow, particularly as power and performance benefits diminish. And while none of that has reduced opportunities for much faster, lower-power chips, it has significantly shifted the dynamics for their design and manufacturing. Rather than just different process nodes and half ... » read more

Detection Of Electric Vehicles And Photovoltaic Systems In Smart Meter Data


In the course of the switch to renewable energy sources, there is a shift from a few large energy sources (power plants) to a large number of small, distributed energy sources (e.g., photovoltaic systems) and energy storage devices (e.g., electric vehicles). This results in the need to know and identify these energy sources and sinks as soon as new devices are installed, in order to ensure grid... » read more

Microelectronics For Quantum Technologies


By Kay-Uwe Giering and Andy Heinig The transition of the quantum mechanics realm into engineering applications is opening up a large number of disruptive quantum technological opportunities. Their success relies on the recent technological advancements, which enable the controlled creation of individual quantum mechanical systems as well as their direct manipulation and measurement. Quantum ... » read more

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