The Growing Challenge Of Thermal Guard-Banding


Guard-banding for heat is becoming more difficult as chips are used across a variety of new and existing applications, forcing chipmakers to architect their way through increasingly complex interactions. Chips are designed to operate at certain temperatures, and it is common practice to develop designs with some margin to ensure correct functionality and performance throughout the operat... » read more

Power Budgets At 3nm And Beyond


There is high confidence that digital logic will continue to shrink at least to 3nm, and possibly down to 1.5nm. Each of those will require significant changes in how design teams approach power. This is somewhat evolutionary for most chipmakers. Five years ago there were fewer than a handful of power experts in most large organizations. Today, everyone deals with power in one way or another... » read more

Memory Tradeoffs Intensify in AI, Automotive Applications


The push to do more processing at the edge is putting a strain on memory design, use models and configurations, leading to some complex tradeoffs in designs across a variety of markets. The problem is these architectures are evolving alongside these new markets, and it isn't always clear how data will move across these chips, between devices, and between systems. Chip architectures are becom... » read more

Designing An AI SoC


Susheel Tadikonda, vice president of networking and storage at Synopsys, looks at how to achieve economies of scale in AI chips and where the common elements are across all the different architectures. https://youtu.be/fm0kxnj3DuM » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP OneSpin Solutions debuted the Hardware Metric Calculation (HMC) App, which uses automatically extracted design information to calculate key hardware metrics to comply with functional safety standards. In particular, it focuses on automotive and autonomous driving SoCs needing to meet the highest functional safety requirements defined by the ISO 26262 standard. The HMC App calcul... » read more

How To Reduce Thermal Guard-Banding


Accuracy in temperature sensors can have a big impact in designs from 40nm down to 7nm and beyond, reducing the amount of guard-banding that is required, which in turn can lower the power and extend the life and reliability of components. But at these process geometries, not all sensors measure temperature equally. Thermal guard-banding is a very important consideration for design teams, and... » read more

Adapting Mobile To A Post-Moore’s Law Era


The slowdown in Moore's Law is having a big impact on chips designed for the mobile market, where battery-powered devices need to still improve performance with lower power. This hasn't slowed down performance or power improvements, but it has forced chipmakers and systems companies to approach designs differently. And while feature shrinks will continue for the foreseeable future, they are ... » read more

Low Power Apps: Shaping The Future Of Low Power Verification


This paper describes how verification and design engineers can make use of UPF 3.0 information model-based HDL and Tcl APIs to write useful low-power apps. We present low-power apps that can be used to solve complex verification issues and provide case studies and examples to demonstrate usage. To read more, click here. » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $35 million for 12 projects involving ultra-efficient power management. Called Arpa-E, the program encouraged participants to use medium-voltage electricity in new ways with real-world applications, such as industry, transportation and the grid. The top two award winners were Eaton Corp. (Arden, NC) for its DC wide-bandgap static circuit breaker, ... » read more

The Race To Multi-Domain SoCs


K. Charles Janac, president and CEO of Arteris IP, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the impact of automotive and AI on chip design. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What do you see as the biggest changes over the next 12 to 24 months? Janac: There are segments of the semiconductor market that are shrinking, such as DTV and simple IoT. Others are going ... » read more

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