3D-ICs May Be The Least-Cost Option


When 2.5D and 3D packaging were first conceived, the general consensus was that only the largest semiconductor houses would be able to afford them, but development costs are quickly coming under control. In some cases, these advanced packages actually may turn out to be the lowest-cost options. With stacked die [1], each die is considered to be a complete functional block or sub-system. In t... » read more

Blog Review: October 25


Synopsys’ Graham Allan looks at enhancements in the LPDDR5X standard, such as a speed increase from 6.4Gbps to 8.5Gbps using the same 1.1V core voltage as LPDDR5 alongside better signal integrity, reliability, and battery efficiency. Cadence’s Krunal Patel examines the essential components and operation of MACsec, a security protocol to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of data tr... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan SRC unfurled its Microelectronics and Advanced Packaging (MAPT) industry-wide 3D semiconductor roadmap, addressing such topics as advanced packaging, heterogeneous integration, analog and mixed-signal semiconductors, energy efficiency, security, the related foundational ecosystem, and more. The guidance is the collective effort of 300 individuals ... » read more

Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

CXL: The Future Of Memory Interconnect?


Momentum for sharing memory resources between processor cores is growing inside of data centers, where the explosion in data is driving the need to be able to scale memory up and down in a way that roughly mirrors how processors are used today. A year after the CXL Consortium and JEDEC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to formalize collaboration between the two organizations, suppor... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Liz Allan, and Gregory Haley. TSMC rolled out the second version of its 3Dblox, which creates an infrastructure for stacking chiplets and other necessary components in a package, along with a standardized way of achieving that. Two novel features are chiplet mirroring for design reuse, and what is basically sandbox for power and thermal analysis of different design elements. ... » read more

IBM’s Energy-Efficient NorthPole AI Unit


At this point it is well known that from an energy efficiency standpoint, the biggest bang for the back is to be found at the highest levels of abstraction. Fitting the right architecture to the task at hand i.e., an application specific architecture, will lead to benefits that are hard or impossible to claw back later in the design and implementation flow.  With the huge increase in the inter... » read more

ReRAM Seeks To Replace NOR


Resistive RAM is gaining renewed attention as demand for faster and cheaper non-volatile memory alternatives continues to grow, particularly in applications such as automotive. Embedded flash has long left designers wishing for better write speeds and lower energy consumption, but as the leading edge of that technology shrunk to 28nm, another problem arose. Manufacturing flash memory at thos... » read more

The Race Toward Quantum Advantage


Quantum computing has yet to show an advantage over conventional computing, but huge sums of money are betting it will. So far that hasn't happened. Early quantum computers were created in the mid-1990s after mathematicians had demonstrated the effectiveness of applying quantum approaches to some problems. At that stage they were simulated using conventional computing, but it started the rac... » read more

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