Chip Industry Week In Review

By The SE Staff - 29 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

By Barry Pangrle - 28 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

By Karen Heyman - 25 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

By Brian Bailey - 14 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

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

Sweeping Changes For Leading-Edge Chip Architectures

By Ed Sperling - 08 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power, signaling a fundamental shift from manufacturing-driven designs to those driven by semiconductor architects. In the past, most chips contained one or two leading-edge technologies, mostly to keep pace with the expected improvements i... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power

By Linda Christensen - 25 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Arm filed its registration statement for a highly anticipated IPO. Chip industry heavyweights Apple, Samsung, NVIDIA, and Intel are all expected to invest. Find the SEC filing here. Taiwan’s National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) laid out a 10-year initiative to bolster its IC design market share to 40% worldwide by 2033, with the first year’s budget of US $376 million. The sh... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

By Karen Heyman - 25 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Intel aims to quadruple capacity for its most advanced chip packaging services by 2025, including with a new facility in Malaysia, per Nikkei Asia. Huawei is building a collection of secret semiconductor fabrication facilities across China to let the company skirt U.S. sanctions, SIA warned in a presentation seen by Bloomberg. It’s acquired at least two existing plants and is building at l... » read more

Who Will Regulate Data Exchanges In Chiplets?

By Ed Sperling - 17 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

Scaling is still important when it comes to logic and low power, but it's no longer the main avenue for improving performance. What used to be a single chip, comprised of various IP blocks and components on a single SoC, is giving way to a heterogeneous collection of chiplets — at least for the big chipmakers and system companies at the leading edge. Chiplets are currently the best solutio... » read more

MRAM Getting More Attention At Smallest Nodes

By Karen Heyman - 10 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 2

Magneto-resistive RAM (MRAM) appears to be gaining traction at the most advanced nodes, in part because of recent improvements in the memory itself and in part because new markets require solutions for which MRAM may be uniquely qualified. There are still plenty of skeptics when it comes to MRAM, and lots of potential competitors. That has limited MRAM to a niche role over the past couple de... » read more

Navigating the Metrology Maze For GAA FETs

By Gregory Haley - 08 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 1

The chip industry is pushing the boundaries of innovation with the evolution of finFETs to gate-all-around (GAA) nanosheet transistors at the 3nm node and beyond, but it also is adding significant new metrology challenges. GAA represents a significant advancement in transistor architecture, where the gate material fully encompasses the nanosheet channel. This approach allows for the vertical... » read more

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