Keeping The Whole Package Cool


Heat dissipation is a critical issue for designers of complex chip-stacking and system-in-package devices. The amount of heat generated by a device increases as the number of transistors goes up, but the ability to dissipate the heat depends on the package surface area. Because the goal of 3D packaging is to squeeze more transistors into less overall space, new heat dissipation issues are em... » read more

Power Management Heats Up


Power management has been talked about a lot recently, especially when it comes to mobile devices. But power is only a part of the issue—and perhaps not even the most important part. Heat is the ultimate limiter. If you cannot comfortably place the device on your face or wrist, then you will not have a successful product. Controlling heat, at the micro and macro levels, is an important asp... » read more

Will 3D-IC Work?


Advanced packaging is becoming real on every level, from fan-outs to advanced fan-outs, 2.5D, and 3D-ICs for memory. But just how far 3D and monolithic 3D will go isn't clear at this point. The reason is almost entirely due to heat. In a speech at SEMI's Integrated Strategy Symposium in January, Babek Sabi, Intel corporate VP and director of assembly and test technology development, warned t... » read more

Thermal Damage To Chips Widens


Heat is becoming a much bigger problem for semiconductor and system design, fueled by higher density and the increasing use of complex chips in markets such as automotive, where reliability is measured in decade-long increments. In the past, heat typically was handled by mechanical engineers, who figured out where to put heat sinks, fans, or holes to funnel heat out of a chassis. But as more... » read more

Tech Talk: Silicon Photonics


Mentor Graphics' John Ferguson explains why light is getting so much attention for inter-chip communications, where it excels, and why it has limitations. This is the first part in a two-part series. [youtube vid=0ydkDmrSrF4] » read more

Reliability In Networking And Telecom Systems


The main source of heat in electronic equipment is their semiconductor chips, and the temperature sensitivities of these chips presents a challenge in designing cooling solutions. Overheating causes the chips to prematurely fail—and failure of only one chip can disable the entire equipment, the higher the chip temperature, the earlier and more certain the failure. As functionality has increas... » read more

Thermally Challenged


Chips run hot and the thermal densities increase with every reduction in fabrication geometry. “When we go down to 16nm the local power density increases by 25% and the local gate density also increases by 25% to 30%,” explains Norman Chang, vice president of product strategy at Ansys/Apache. In fact, this is becoming such a large problem that it is affecting the scaling process itsel... » read more

Heat Wreaks Havoc


By Ann Steffora Mutschler As semiconductor manufacturing technology has scaled ever smaller, the density of power grid networks has caused on-chip temperatures to rise, negatively impacting performance, power, and reliability. CMOS technology, still the predominant material in SoCs, was originally conceived as a low-power technology when compared with the bipolar approach, which was a very... » read more

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