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

Keeping IC Packages Cool


Placing multiple chips into a package side-by-side can alleviate thermal issues, but as companies dive further into die stacking and denser packaging to boost performance and reduce power, they are wrestling with a whole new set of heat-related issues. The shift to advanced packaging enables chipmakers to meet demands for increasing bandwidth, clock speeds, and power density for high perform... » read more

Impact Of GAA Transistors At 3/2nm


The chip industry is poised for another change in transistor structure as gate-all-around (GAA) FETs replace finFETs at 3nm and below, creating a new set of challenges for design teams that will need to be fully understood and addressed. GAA FETs are considered an evolutionary step from finFETs, but the impact on design flows and tools is still expected to be significant. GAA FETs will offer... » read more

Do We Have An IC Model Crisis?


Models are critical for IC design. Without them, it's impossible to perform analysis, which in turn limits optimizations. Those optimizations are especially important as semiconductors become more heterogenous, more customized, and as they are integrated into larger systems, creating a need for higher-accuracy models that require massive compute power to develop. But those factors, and other... » read more

Recent Advances in Thermal Metamaterials and Their Future Applications for Electronics Packaging


Abstract: "Thermal metamaterials exhibit thermal properties that do not exist in nature but can be rationally designed to offer unique capabilities of controlling heat transfer. Recent advances have demonstrated successful manipulation of conductive heat transfer and led to novel heat guiding structures such as thermal cloaks, concentrators, etc. These advances imply new opportunities to gui... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Nov. 9


Integrated transistor cooling Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) created a single chip that combines a transistor and microfluidic cooling system for more efficient transistor heat management. The team focused on a co-design approach for the electrical and mechanical aspects of the chip, bringing the electronics and cooling design together and aiming to extract... » read more

Making Chips To Last Their Expected Lifetimes


Chips are supposed to last their lifetime, but that expectation varies greatly depending upon the end market, whether the device is used for safety- or mission-critical applications, and even whether it can be easily replaced or remotely fixed. It also depends on how those chips are used, whether they are an essential part of a complex system, and whether the cost of continual monitoring and... » read more

112G SerDes Reliability


Priyank Shukla, product marketing manager at Synopsys, digs into 112Gbps SerDes, why it’s important to examine the performance of these devices in the context of a system, what is acceptable channel loss, and how density can affect performance, power and noise. » read more

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