Blog Review: June 14


Synopsys' Richard Solomon and Gary Ruggles examine the Compute Express Link (CXL) protocol and how it could unlock new ways of doing computing such as enabling efficient heterogeneous computing architectures, accelerating data-intensive workloads, and facilitating advanced real-time analytics. Cadence's Andre Baguenie explains how to convert an electrical signal to a logic value using the Ve... » read more

Auto Industry Relationships Re-Form, But Differently


The automotive industry is in the midst of rapid change on many fronts. OEMs are exploring new functions and features to add to their vehicles, including chiplets, electrification, autonomous features, as well as new vehicle architectures that will determine how vehicles are going to be designed from the foundation up. But all of this is dependent on the relationships between all of the ecosyst... » read more

Power/Performance Costs Of Securing Systems


For much of the chip industry, concerns about security are relatively new, but the requirement for protecting semiconductor devices is becoming pervasive. Unfortunately for many industries, that lesson has been learned the hard way. Security breaches have led to the loss of sensitive data, ransomware attacks that lock up data, theft of intellectual property or financial resources, and loss o... » read more

EDA’s Role Grows For Preventing And Identifying Failures


The front end of design is becoming more tightly integrated with the back end of manufacturing, driven by the rising cost and impact of failures in advanced chips and critical applications. Ironically, the starting point for this shift is failure analysis (FA), which typically happens when a device fails to yield, or worse, when it is returned due to some problem. In production, that leads t... » read more

How To Answer Five Common Questions About Power Module Current Density


Power module current density is an important factor in determining the efficiency and performance of power modules. This article answers five common questions about power module current density so you can make informed decisions when designing a power module for your application. 1. How many wire bonds are required? Generally, a higher current density requires an increased number of w... » read more

Power Modules: A Four-Dimensional Design Challenge Calls For A Holistic Design And Verification Approach


A power module is a high-power switching circuit used in applications for electric vehicles, renewable energy, photovoltaics, wind power, and much more. Switching-element IGBTs and MOSFETs are used in these modules. This paper discusses different technologies and the associated design challenges to achieve complex power module requirements like high voltage resistivity up to 1700 V, high curren... » read more

Blog Review: June 7


Synopsys' Kenneth Larsen and Powerchip's S.Z. Chang explore wafer-on-wafer (WoW) and chip-on-wafer (CoW), 3D hybrid bonding schemes that can be used to stack memory on logic with shorter signal transmission distance at no wasted power and more interconnect and bandwidth density. In a podcast, Siemens' Conor Peick, Nand Kochhar, and Mark Sampson chat about how companies can address growing co... » read more

Uncovering Instabilities In Variational-Quantum Deep Q-Networks


By Maja Franz (1), Lucas Wolf (1), Maniraman Periyasamy (2), Christian Ufrecht (2), Daniel D. Scherer (2), Axel Plinge (2), Christopher Mutschler (2), Wolfgang Mauerer (1,3) (1) Technical University of Applied Sciences, Regensburg, Germany, (2) Fraunhofer-IIS, Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, Division Positioning and Networks, Nuremberg, Germany, (3) Siemens AG, Corporate ... » read more

From Lab To Fab: Increasing Pressure To Fuse IC Processes


Test, metrology, and inspection are essential for both the lab and the fab, but fusing them together so that data created in one is easily transferred to the other is a massive challenge. The chip industry has been striving to bridge these separate worlds for years, but the economics, speed, and complexity of change require a new approach. The never-ending push toward smaller, better-defined... » read more

Journey From Cell-Aware To Device-Aware Testing Begins


Early results of using device-aware testing on alternative memories show expanded test coverage, but this is just the start. Once the semiconductor industry realized that it was suffering from device failures even when test programs achieved 100% fault coverage, it went about addressing this disconnect between the way defects manifest themselves inside devices and the commonly used fault mod... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →