Why Chiplets Don’t Work For All Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss use cases and challenges for commercial chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts... » read more

Managing P/P Tradeoffs With Voltage Droop Gets Trickier


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about voltage droop/IR drop with Bill Mullen, distinguished engineer at Ansys; Rajat Chaudhry, product management group director at Cadence; Heidi Barnes, senior applications engineer at Keysight Technologies; Venkatesh Santhanagopalan, product manager at Movellus; Joe Davis, senior director for Calibre interfaces and mPower EM/IR... » read more

Performance & Efficiency Cores For Servers


HotChips 2023 was held August 27-29, 2023 at Stanford University in California and was the first in-person version of the conference in 4 years. The conference was held in a hybrid format that had over 500 participants in-person and over 1,000 attending virtually online. Topics covered a broad range of advancements in computing, connectivity, and computer architecture. Both AMD and Intel gav... » read more

Balancing IR Drop Unpredictability With Post-Silicon Flexibility


The concept of IR drop in silicon chips has always been a crucial aspect of chip design. However, recent technological trends and the emergence of new challenges, such as voltage-sensitive paths, have introduced a degree of uncertainty in predicting and effectively managing IR drop. These uncertainties are driving the need for a more flexible approach in mitigating on-die voltage droop. Increa... » read more

Preparing For Commercial Chiplets


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the path to commercialization of chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts of tha... » read more

Managing Voltage Variation


Engineers make many tradeoffs when designing SoC’s to better meet design specifications. Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are the primary goals and all three impact the cost of the implementation. For example, higher power and performance can both require more expensive packaging for power and signal integrity as well as cooling. The larger the die area the fewer die per wafer which drives u... » read more

Battling Over Shrinking Physical Margin In Chips


Smaller process nodes, coupled with a continual quest to add more features into designs, are forcing chipmakers and systems companies to choose which design and manufacturing groups have access to a shrinking pool of technology margin. In the past margin largely was split between the foundries, which imposed highly restrictive design rules (RDRs) to compensate for uncertainties in new proces... » read more

Synchronous Die-to-Die Signaling Using Aeonic Connect


This paper presents a system providing accurate clock alignment for on-die and die-to-die synchronous circuits. A low-frequency reference clock provides an accurate timing reference with low power consumption, while distributed delay lines align the endpoints of loosely constrained clock trees. For on-die clocks, this synchronization strategy severs the traditional relationship between power an... » read more

Demand For Timing Innovation Grows


The semiconductor industry has begun exploring a range of timing options as demand for increased performance and more features exceeds the ability to design chips using the same techniques and technology that have been relied on for decades. Like many elements in computing, timing is a hierarchy or stack. It includes everything from partitioning AI computations into multiple parts and assemb... » read more

Supercomputing Efficiency Lags Performance Gains


In last month’s article, Top 500: Frontier is Still on Top, I wrote about the latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists. Power is an incredibly important aspect of designing a world performance leading supercomputer. (Why, I can remember back to when you could run the world’s fastest machine on only a couple MW of power.) The first Green500 list was published back in 2013. Happy 1... » read more

← Older posts