The Ever-Increasing Role Of PVT Monitor IP And Its Significance In Silicon Lifecycle Management


The demand for semiconductor chips has grown exponentially over the years, driven by advancements in technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 5G, automotive and cloud. With this increased demand, there is a growing need for more reliable semiconductor chips that can operate under extreme conditions and withstand the rigors of modern applications. Here are some of th... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management Advances With Unified Analytics


In a typical day in the life of a product engineer, they have gone through the requisite wafer sort testing in manufacturing with the next step to assemble the resultant good die into their respective packages. While performing a series of parametric tests during final test, yield issues are encountered and the process of finding the source of the issues begins. Luckily, with access to a good d... » read more

How To Raise Reliability, Availability, And Serviceability Levels For HPC SoCs


By Charlie Matar, Rita Horner, and Pawini Mahajan While once the domain of large data centers and supercomputers, high-performance computing (HPC) has become rather ubiquitous and, in some cases, essential in our everyday lives. Because of this, reliability, availability, and serviceability, or RAS, is a concept that more HPC SoC designers should familiarize themselves with. RAS may sound... » read more

Designing For Thermal


Heat has emerged as a major concern for semiconductors in every form factor, from digital watches to data centers, and it is becoming more of a problem at advanced nodes and in advanced packages where that heat is especially difficult to dissipate. Temperatures at the base of finFETs and GAA FETs can differ from those at the top of the transistor structures. They also can vary depending on h... » read more

Key Applications For In-Chip Monitoring IP


The latest SoCs on advanced semiconductor nodes especially FinFET, typically include a fabric of sensors spread across the die and for good reason. But why and what are the benefits? This article explores some of the key applications for In Chip monitoring and why embedding In Chip monitoring IP is an essential step to maximize performance and reliability and minimize power, or a combination of... » read more

Who Owns In-Chip Monitoring Data?


In-chip monitors provide unprecedented visibility into the inner workings of complex integrated circuits for everything from process control to fine binning, preventive system maintenance, and failure analysis. But there may be many consumers of different slices of the data at very different phases of the chip lifecycle, raising questions about who controls and owns all of that data. The ans... » read more

Pitching To Your Audience


One of the most time-consuming parts of being a journalist is listening to enough people to get all sides of a story. Writing the story is often the easy part. What makes listening more difficult is that there are detail people and concept people, but few that sit in the middle. Some people love to get down into the details about the latest feature they have just implemented in a tool, or wh... » read more

In-Chip Sensing And PVT Monitoring: Not Just An Insurance Policy


You wouldn’t drive an expensive car without insurance or take a flight in an aircraft without performing instrument and control surface checks. So why would you take the risk of designing a multi-million dollar advanced node semiconductor device without making sure you are aware of, and able to manage, the dynamic conditions that had the potential to make or break a silicon product? Advanced... » read more

A View Across The Siliconscape


What would it look like if you had the magical ability to look inside a chip and cast your eyes across the tumultuous activities within the silicon itself? If you could gaze into the die and see the real-time peaks and troughs of voltage supply, stressed areas with high activity and heat and areas of calm where uneven workloads create idle processor cores. A vision of the chip landscape, seasca... » read more

Completing The Silicon Lifecycle Management Puzzle


The year 2020 will be remembered for many reasons. The global pandemic, the political struggles and the extreme weather will occupy our thoughts for many years. There was another event that occurred in 2020 that will also be remembered in a smaller, but very important portion of the world. It’s the year that Synopsys acquired Moortec to complete the silicon lifecycle management (SLM) puzzle. ... » read more

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