IC Test And Quality Requirements Drive New Collaboration


Rapidly increasing chip and package complexity, coupled with an incessant demand for more reliability, has triggered a frenzy of alliances and working relationships that are starting to redefine how chips are tested and monitored. At the core of this shift is a growing recognition that no company can do everything, and that to work together will require much tighter integration of flows, met... » read more

FPGA-based Infrastructure, With RISC-V Prototype, to Enable Implementation & Evaluation of Cross-Layer Techniques in Real HW (Best Paper Award)


A technical paper titled "MetaSys: A Practical Open-Source Metadata Management System to Implement and Evaluate Cross-Layer Optimizations" was published by researchers at University of Toronto, ETH Zurich, and Carnegie Mellon University. This paper won the Best Paper Award at the HiPEAC 2023 conference. Abstract: "This paper introduces the first open-source FPGA-based infrastructure, MetaSy... » read more

Finding Frameworks For End-To-End Analytics


End-to-end analytics can improve yield and ROI on tool purchases, but reaping those benefits will require common data formats, die traceability, an appropriate level of data granularity — and a determination of who owns what data. New standards, guidelines, and consortium efforts are being developed to remove these barriers to data sharing for analytics purposes. But the amount of work req... » read more

Big Payback For Combining Different Types Of Fab Data


Collecting and combining diverse data types from different manufacturing processes can play a significant role in improving semiconductor yield, quality, and reliability, but making that happen requires integrating deep domain expertise from various different process steps and sifting through huge volumes of data scattered across a global supply chain. The semiconductor manufacturing IC data... » read more

Containing The Explosion In Data


The amount of data that could be kept for every design is gargantuan, but even that may not be enough these days as lifecycle management, continuous verification, regulatory requirements, and globalization add to the data that needs to be stored. But data has no value if it cannot be found or used in ways that provide more benefit than the cost of storing it. "Data management is not unique t... » read more

Network Storage Optimization In Chip Design


Prathna Sekar, technical account manager at ClioSoft, explains how to manage large quantities of data, how this can quickly spin out of control as colleagues check in data during the design process, and how to reduce the amount that needs to be stored. » read more