IC Power Optimization Required, But More Difficult To Achieve


Power optimization is playing an increasingly vital role in chip and chip and system designs, but it's also becoming much harder to achieve as transistor density and system complexity continue to grow. This is especially evident with advanced packages, chiplets, and high-performance chips, all of which are becoming more common in complex designs. Inside data centers, racks of servers are str... » read more

Temperature: A Growing Concern For Chip Security Experts


While everyone in the semiconductor industry wants to have the hottest new product, having that type of temperature manifest in a literal sense poses a threat not just to product stability and performance but to the security of the chips themselves. Temperature has become an object of fascination to security researchers due to the vagaries of how the physical properties of heat affect perfor... » read more

The Future Of Memory


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the impact of off-chip memory on power and heat, and what can be done to optimize performance, with Frank Ferro, group director, product management at Cadence; Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus; Jongsin Yun, memory technologist at Siemens EDA; Randy White, memory solutions program manager at Keysight; a... » read more

Power Semiconductor Devices: Thermal Management and Packaging


A technical paper titled "Thermal management and packaging of wide and ultra-wide bandgap power devices: a review and perspective" was published by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, and Univ Lyon, CNRS. "This paper provides a timely review of the thermal management of WBG and UWBG power devices with an emphasis on packaged dev... » read more

3D-IC: Operator Learning Framework For Ultra-Fast 3D Chip Thermal Prediction Under Multiple Chip Design Configurations


A new technical paper titled "DeepOHeat: Operator Learning-based Ultra-fast Thermal Simulation in 3D-IC Design" was published (preprint) by researchers at UCSB and Cadence. Abstract "Thermal issue is a major concern in 3D integrated circuit (IC) design. Thermal optimization of 3D IC often requires massive expensive PDE simulations. Neural network-based thermal prediction models can perform ... » read more

Modeling and Thermal Analysis of 3DIC


A new technical paper titled "Heat transfer in a multi-layered semiconductor device with spatially-varying thermal contact resistance between layers" was published by researchers at UT Arlington. "This work presents a theoretical model to determine the steady state temperature distribution in a general M-layer structure with spatial variation in thermal contact resistance between adjacent la... » read more

Hot Trends In Semiconductor Thermal Management


Increasing thermal challenges, as the industry moves into 3D packaging and continues to scale digital logic, are pushing the limits of R&D. The basic physics of having too much heat trapped in too small a space is leading to tangible problems, like consumer products that are too hot to hold. Far worse, however, is the loss of power and reliability, as overheated DRAM has to continually r... » read more

How Climate Change Affects Data Centers


Data centers are hot, and they may get even hotter. As climate change impacts temperatures around the world, designers are changing the computing hubs that are tied to nearly every aspect of modern life to make them more efficient, more customized, and potentially more disaggregated. These shifts are taking on new urgency as the tech industry grapples with months of sweltering temperatures o... » read more

Thermal Management Challenges and Requirements of 3 types of Microelectronic Devices


New technical paper titled "A Review on Transient Thermal Management of Electronic Devices" from researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. Abstract "Much effort in the area of electronics thermal management has focused on developing cooling solutions that cater to steady-state operation. However, electronic devices are increasingly being used in applications involving time-varyi... » read more

DRAM Thermal Issues Reach Crisis Point


Within the DRAM world, thermal issues are at a crisis point. At 14nm and below, and in the most advanced packaging schemes, an entirely new metric may be needed to address the multiplier effect of how thermal density increasingly turns minor issues into major problems. A few overheated transistors may not greatly affect reliability, but the heat generated from a few billion transistors does.... » read more

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