Choosing The Correct High-Bandwidth Memory


The number of options for how to build high-performance chips is growing, but the choices for attached memory have barely budged. To achieve maximum performance in automotive, consumer, and hyperscale computing, the choices come down to one or more flavors of DRAM, and the biggest tradeoff is cost versus speed. DRAM remains an essential component in any of these architectures, despite years ... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects


Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

Design And Verification Methodologies Breaking Down


Tools, methodologies and flows that have been in place since the dawn of semiconductor design are breaking down, but this time there isn't a large pool of researchers coming up with potential solutions. The industry is on its own to formulate those ideas, and that will take a lot of cooperation between EDA companies, fabs, and designers, which has not been their strong point in the past. It ... » read more

Choosing The Right Memory At The Edge


As the amount of data produced by sensors in cars and phones continues to grow, more of that data needs to be processed locally. It takes too much time and power to send it all to the cloud. But choosing the right memory for a particular application requires a series of tradeoffs involving cost, bandwidth, power, which can vary greatly by device, application, and even the data itself. Frank Fer... » read more

Adapting To Broad Shifts Essential In 2022


Change creates opportunity, but not every company is able to respond quickly enough to take advantage of those opportunities. Others may respond too quickly, before they properly understand the implications. At the start of a typical year, optimism is in plentiful supply. Any positive trend is seen as continuing, and any negative is seen as turning around. Normally the later in the year that... » read more

Boosting Data Center Memory Performance In The Zettabyte Era With HBM3


We are living in the Zettabyte era, a term first coined by Cisco. Most of the world’s data has been created over the past few years and it is not set to slow down any time soon. Data has become not just big, but enormous! In fact, according to the IDC Global Datasphere 2022-2026 Forecast, the amount of data generated over the next 5 years will be at least 2x the amount of data generated over ... » read more

Systematic Yield Issues Now Top Priority At Advanced Nodes


Systematic yield issues are supplanting random defects as the dominant concern in semiconductor manufacturing at the most advanced process nodes, requiring more time, effort, and cost to achieve sufficient yield. Yield is the ultimate hush hush topic in semiconductor manufacturing, but it's also the most critical because it determines how many chips can be profitably sold. "At older nodes, b... » read more

Cost Characteristics of the 2.5D Chiplet-Based SiP System


A technical paper titled "Cost-Aware Exploration for Chiplet-Based Architecture with Advanced Packaging Technologies" was published by researchers at UCSB, University of California, Santa Barbara. Abstract: "The chiplet-based System-in-Package~(SiP) technology enables more design flexibility via various inter-chiplet connection and heterogeneous integration. However, it is not known how to ... » read more

Scalable Optical AI Accelerator Based on a Crossbar Architecture


A new technical paper titled "Scalable Coherent Optical Crossbar Architecture using PCM for AI Acceleration" was published by researchers at University of Washington. Abstract: "Optical computing has been recently proposed as a new compute paradigm to meet the demands of future AI/ML workloads in datacenters and supercomputers. However, proposed implementations so far suffer from lack of sc... » read more

Memory-Based Cyberattacks Become More Complex, Difficult To Detect


Memories are becoming entry points for cyber attacks, raising concerns about system-level security because memories are nearly ubiquitous in electronics and breaches are difficult to detect. There is no end in sight with hackers taking aim at almost every consumer, industrial, and commercial segment, and a growing number of those devices connected to the internet and to each other. According... » read more

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