Cloud 2.0


Corporate data centers are reluctant adopters of new technology. There is too much at stake to make quick changes, which accounts for a number of failed semiconductor startups over the past decade with better ideas for more efficient processors, not to mention rapid consolidation in other areas. But as the amount of data increases, and the cost of processing that data decreases at a slower rate... » read more

Executive Insight: Wally Rhines


Wally Rhines, chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphics, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about what's changing across a wide swath of the industry, where the new opportunities will be, when security will become a real opportunity for EDA, and why Moore's Law will die but progress will continue forever. SE: Looking back over the past year, what's changed and where are the possible r... » read more

The Future Of Moore’s Law


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of Moore's Law with Jan Rabaey, Donald O. Pederson distinguished professor at [getentity id="22165" comment="UC Berkeley"]; Lucio Lanza, managing director of Lanza techVentures; Subramani Kengeri, vice president of advanced technology architecture at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; Charlie Cheng, CEO of [getentity id="2... » read more

Intel Plus Altera


Since the Intel-Altera deal reached the handshake phase earlier this month, there have been a lot of theories being forwarded and a lot of questions being raised. And there have been very few answers, in part because the deal isn't finalized yet and in part because this marriage will take time to play out in the market—maybe years. But along with the GlobalFoundries-IBM pairing, this is th... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Since the global economic recession of 2008-2009, the IC industry has pared down older fab capacity. From 2009-2014, semiconductor manufacturers have closed or repurposed 83 wafer fabs, including a few 300mm plants, according to IC Insights. Are 3D DRAMs finally here? SK Hynix is shipping mass production volumes of its first-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM1). Samsung is also backing it... » read more

Getting Over Overlay


Chipmakers continue to migrate to the next node, but there are signs that traditional IC scaling is slowing down. So what’s causing the slowdown? Or for that matter, what could ultimately undo [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"]? It could be a combination of factors. To be sure, IC design costs and complexity are soaring at each node. Scaling challenges are also playing a role. And ov... » read more

3 Ways To Reload Moore’s Law


The electronics revolution has been enabled because the cost and power per transistor has decreased 30% per year for the last 30 years — a fact usually associated with Moore's Law. This has been accomplished by simply reducing the transistor size while offsetting increased costs of equipment and mask levels, and by increased productivity from improved yield, throughput and wafer size. This... » read more

Managing Dynamic Power


Working with finFETs is a study in contrasts. While leakage is now under control for the first time in several process generations due to the advent of different gate technology, dynamic power density caused by tightly packed transistors and higher clock speeds has become the big issue. “FinFET technology helps with reducing static/leakage power so when your logic is not active, you can sh... » read more

SoC Integration Headaches Grow


As the number of IP blocks grows, so do the headaches of integrating the various pieces and making sure they perform as planned within a prescribed power envelope. This is easier said than done, particularly at the most advanced process nodes. There are more blocks, more power domains, more states and use-model dependencies, and there is much more contention for memories. There are physical ... » read more

Big Data Needs Bigger Memory


By Rodrigo Liang Over the last few decades, the semiconductor industry has focused its considerable technical investments in accelerating software applications. Performance metrics for new semiconductor products are often correlated with their ability to lower the latency to access data required to run specific software applications. The need for increased performance from semiconductors ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →