Scaling Simulation


Without functional simulation the semiconductor industry would not be where it is today, but some people in the industry contend it hasn't received the attention and research it deserves, causing a stagnation in performance. Others disagree, noting that design sizes have increased by orders of magnitude while design times have shrunk, pointing to simulation remaining a suitable tool for the job... » read more

RISC-V Targets Data Centers


RISC-V vendors are beginning to aim much higher in the compute hierarchy, targeting data centers and supercomputers rather than just simple embedded applications on the edge. In the past, this would have been nearly impossible for a new instruction set architecture. But a growing focus on heterogeneous chip integration, combined with the reduced benefits of scaling and increasing demand for ... » read more

Applications, Challenges For Using AI In Fabs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. Wh... » read more

HPC Appliance Boosts Simulation Performance


High-performance computing (HPC) resources can provide a substantial boost to simulation, but an HPC cluster can be complex and difficult to manage. By deploying a managed HPC cluster for ARA, the client was able to eliminate internal maintenance and support overhead, while improving productivity and reliability for their Ansys workloads. Click here to read more. » read more

A Performance Analysis Of The First Generation Of HPC‐Optimized Arm Processors


In this paper, the authors present performance results from Isambard, the first production supercomputer to be based on Arm CPUs that have been optimized specifically for HPC. Isambard is the first Cray XC50 “Scout” system, combining Cavium ThunderX2 Arm‐based CPUs with Cray's Aries interconnect. The full Isambard system contained over 10,000 Arm cores. In this work, we present node‐lev... » read more

‘More Than Moore’ Reality Check


The semiconductor industry is embracing multi-die packages as feature scaling hits the limits of physics, but how to get there with the least amount of pain and at the lowest cost is a work in progress. Gaps remain in tooling and methodologies, interconnect standards are still being developed, and there are so many implementations of packaging that the number of choices is often overwhelming. ... » read more

The New CXL Standard


Gary Ruggles, senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, digs into the new Compute Express Link standard, why it’s important for high bandwidth in AI/ML applications, where it came from, and how to apply it in current and future designs. » read more

HBM2E: The E Stands for Evolutionary


Samsung introduced the first memory products in March that conform to JEDEC’s HBM2E specification, but so far nothing has come to market—a reflection of just how difficult it is to manufacture this memory in volume. Samsung’s new HBM2E (sold under the Flashbolt brand name, versus the older Aquabolt and Flarebolt brands), offers 33% better performance over HBM2 thanks to doubling the de... » read more

Open Source Processors: Fact Or Fiction?


Open source processors are rapidly gaining mindshare, fueled in part by early successes of RISC-V, but that interest frequently is accompanied by misinformation based on wishful thinking and a lack of understanding about what exactly open source entails. Nearly every recent conference has some mention of RISC-V in particular, and open source processors in general, whether that includes keyno... » read more

System Bits: June 25


Supercomputers around the world At last week’s International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, the 53rd biannual list of the Top500 of the most powerful computing systems in the world was released. Broken out by countries of installation, China has 219 of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers, compared with 116 in the United States. Ranking by percent of list flops, the ... » read more

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