What’s Before Stacked Die?


By Mark LaPedus Advanced 2.5D/3D chip stacking has a number of challenges and is still a few years away from mass production. In fact, mass production may not occur until 2015 or 2016. But OEMs can ill afford to sit still and wait for 2.5D/3D technology to mature. So, until 2.5D/3D is ready for prime time, chipmakers and IC-packaging houses are under pressure to innovate and extend current ... » read more

Foundry Landscape Changes In 3D


By Mark LaPedus Over the last year, leading-edge silicon foundries announced their new and respective strategies in the emerging 2.5D/3D chip arena. The ink is barely dry and now the foundry landscape is changing. One new vendor, Tezzaron Semiconductor, is entering the market. The 3D DRAM supplier plans to provide select 2.5D/3D foundry services within its recently acquired fab in Austin, T... » read more

DFM Challenges Abound Below 20nm


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As semiconductor design teams struggle to wring the last few percentage of die shrink from a technology node, much of the ability to do that rests on the EDA tools. From place and route through DFM checks—essentially, everything that happens before the design is sent to the fab or foundry—it all must be tightly integrated with the manufacturing process so it co... » read more

Mix-And-Match Power Options


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Choices abound today when it comes to considering a node shrink. Fully depleted silicon on insulator (FD-SOI) and finFET technologies along with other advanced transistor options are being evaluated, both together and independently of the other. It is possible to implement finFET on bulk 28nm CMOS or finFET on an FD-SOI process, for example. It is also possible to imp... » read more

Virtual IDM Progress Report


By Ed Sperling Complexity, tight power budgets, disaggregation of the supply chain and market fragmentation are conspiring to force much tighter partnerships among companies that develop different pieces of an SoC, as well as those that collaborate on even larger systems. This confluence of factors has forced the rules for how companies work together to be rewritten, but even within that frame... » read more

Chip Architect Challenges


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Product lifecycles can be shorter than the design cycle and even the process development cycle, particularly in the consumer handheld device market. It’s up to the chip architect to decide how the functions should be implemented. The good news is there are a number of options available, ranging from mapping the design to 2.5D technology, moving to finFET tr... » read more

Experts At The Table: Obstacles In Low-Power Design


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power design with with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Richard Trihy, director of design enablement at GlobalFoundries; Venki Venkatesh, engineering director at Atrenta; and Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: If you ar... » read more

Experts At The Table: Obstacles In Low-Power Design


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power design with with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Richard Trihy, director of design enablement at GlobalFoundries; Venki Venkatesh, engineering director at Atrenta; and Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: If you ar... » read more

To Shrink Or Not To Shrink…And How Much?


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The 28nm semiconductor manufacturing node is in full swing with 20nm process development ramping quickly. As such, the industry has been looking ahead to the next node shrink to achieve the power, performance and cost advantages that a node shrink promises. However, as we are well aware by now, traditional CMOS planar technology is not scaling as it did in previous ge... » read more

Experts At The Table: Obstacles In Low-Power Design


By Ed Sperling Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering sat down to discuss low-power design with with Leah Clark, associate technical director at Broadcom; Richard Trihy, director of design enablement at GlobalFoundries; Venki Venkatesh, engineering director at Atrenta; and Qi Wang, technical marketing group director at Cadence. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. LPHP: What effe... » read more

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