Blog Review: Nov. 16


Siemens EDA's Jake Wiltgen explains the difference between transient and permanent faults when designing to the ISO 26262 standard, including where they come from and key ways to protect against them. Synopsys' Vikas Gautam points to how the economics of designing large SoCs is driving chiplet-based designs and the need for die-to-die standards such as UCIe, along with the key protocol verif... » read more

Improving Reliability In Automobiles


Carmakers are turning to predictive and preventive maintenance to improve the safety and reliability of increasingly electrified vehicles, setting the stage for more internal and external sensors, and more intelligence to interpret and react to the data generated by those sensors. The number of chips inside of vehicles has been steadily rising, regardless of whether they are powered by elect... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


U.S. President Joe Biden appears ready to increase pressure on Japan and the Netherlands to help block the flow of advanced chip technology to China, where it can be used to develop cutting-edge weapons. "You will see Japan and Netherlands follow our lead," U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told CNBC. Japan plans to budget ¥350 billion ($2.38 billion) in a research collaboration with th... » read more

Taking Power Much More Seriously


An increasing number of electronic systems are becoming limited by thermal issues, and the only way to solve them is by elevating energy consumption to a primary design concern rather than a last-minute optimization technique. The optimization of any system involves a complex balance of static and dynamic techniques. The goal is to achieve maximum functionality and performance in the smalles... » read more

Are You Paying Proper Attention To Your ESD Design Windows?


Electrostatic discharge (ESD) issues in integrated circuit (IC) chip designs have become more critical at advanced semiconductor process nodes, due to shrinking transistor dimensions and oxide layer thickness [1]. There are many ESD design rules and flows that designers check for common ESD issues, such as topological checks for the existence of ESD protection devices, current density (CD) chec... » read more

Solving Thermal Coupling Issues In Complex Chips


Rising chip and packaging complexity is causing a proportionate increase in thermal couplings, which can reduce performance, shorten the lifespan of chips, and impact overall reliability of chips and systems. Thermal coupling is essentially a junction between two devices, such as a chip and a package, or a transistor and a substrate, in which heat is transferred from one to the other. If not... » read more

Balancing Power And Heat In Advanced Chip Designs


Power and heat use to be someone else's problem. That's no longer the case, and the issues are spreading as more designs migrate to more advanced process nodes and different types of advanced packaging. There are a number of reasons for this shift. To begin with, there are shrinking wire diameters, thinner dielectrics, and thinner substrates. The scaling of wires requires more energy to driv... » read more

Weird Incidents Reveal L5 Challenges


A series of surprising, counterintuitive, and sometimes bizarre incidents reveal the challenges of achieving full Level 5 autonomy in self-driving vehicles, which are an increasingly common site in major cities. While it’s easy to dismiss such anecdotes as humorous glitches compared with the sobering accounts of autonomous tech-related injuries and fatalities, industry executives say these oc... » read more

Complete Reliability Verification For Multiple-Power-Domain Designs


With increasing design complexity and a heightened focus on reliability at all levels of integrated circuit (IC) design from intellectual property (IP) to full-chip, accurate and full verification coverage of the different reliability concerns within an IC design is essential. Designs containing multiple power domains add more complexity to reliability verification with the need to validate int... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 9


Cadence's Claire Ying finds that the latest update to CXL, which introduced memory-centric fabric architectures and expanded capabilities for improving scale and optimizing resource utilization, could change how some of the world’s largest data centers and fastest supercomputers are built. Synopsys' Gervais Fong and Morten Christiansen examine the latest updates in the USB 80Gbps specifica... » read more

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