Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

By Mark LaPedus - 23 Jul, 2021 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers and OEMs The industry is still wondering if Intel will buy GlobalFoundries (GF). In the meantime, GF has announced a fab expansion plan in upstate New York. These plans include immediate investments at its existing Fab 8 facility as well as construction of a new fab on the same campus. That will double the capacity at the site. Intel has reported its second-quarter 2021 financial... » read more

FeFETs Bring Promise And Challenges

By Bryon Moyer - 17 Feb, 2021 - Comments: 3

Ferroelectric FETs (FeFETs) and memory (FeRAM) are generating high levels of interest in the research community. Based on a physical mechanism that hasn’t yet been commercially exploited, they join the other interesting new physics ideas that are in various stages of commercialization. “FeRAM is very promising, but it's like all promising memory technologies — it takes a while to get b... » read more

3D NAND’s Vertical Scaling Race

By Mark LaPedus - 17 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 1

3D NAND suppliers are accelerating their efforts to move to the next technology nodes in a race against growing competition, but all of these vendors are facing an assortment of new business, manufacturing, and cost challenges. Two suppliers, Micron and SK Hynix, recently leapfrogged the competition and have taken the scaling race lead in 3D NAND. But Samsung and the Kioxia-Western Digital (... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 2

By Jesse Allen - 02 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Mentor's Harry Foster investigates the effectiveness of today’s FPGA verification processes in terms of nontrivial bug escapes into production as part of the 2020 Wilson Research Group Functional Verification Study. Synopsys' Chris Clark points to how integral sensors are to the modern vehicle and key design considerations for making them more effective, safe, and reliable. Cadence's Pa... » read more

What Happened To Execute-in-Place?

By Bryon Moyer - 25 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 0

Executing code directly from non-volatile memory, where it is stored, greatly simplifies compute architectures — especially for simple embedded devices like microcontrollers (MCUs). However, the divergence of memory and logic processes has made that nearly impossible today. The term “execute-in-place,” or ”XIP,” originated with the embedded NOR memory in MCUs that made XIP viable. ... » read more

NVM Reliability Challenges And Tradeoffs

By Bryon Moyer - 13 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

This second of two parts looks at different memories and possible solutions. Part one can be found here. While various NVM technologies, such as PCRAM, MRAM, ReRAM and NRAM share similar high-level traits, their physical renderings are quite different. That provides each with its own set of challenges and solutions. PCRAM has had a fraught history. Initially released by Samsung, Micron, a... » read more

What Is DRAM’s Future?

By Bryon Moyer - 09 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

Memory — and DRAM in particular — has moved into the spotlight as it finds itself in the critical path to greater system performance. This isn't the first time DRAM has been the center of attention involving performance. The problem is that not everything progresses at the same rate, creating serial bottlenecks in everything from processor performance to transistor design, and even the t... » read more

Inside The New Non-Volatile Memories

By Bryon Moyer - 07 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

The search continues for new non-volatile memories (NVMs) to challenge the existing incumbents, but before any technology can be accepted, it must be proven reliable. “Everyone is searching for a universal memory,” says TongSwan Pang, Fujitsu senior marketing manager. "Different technologies have different reliability challenges, and not all of them may be able to operate in automotive g... » read more

Blog Review: March 25

By Jesse Allen - 25 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Rambus' Steven Woo checks out common memory systems that are used in the highest performance AI applications and points to the differences between on-chip memory, HBM, and GDDR. Mentor's Colin Walls considers whether software for embedded systems should be delivered as a binary library or source code and warns of some key potential issues when requesting source code. A Synopsys writer poi... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 18

By Jesse Allen - 18 Dec, 2019 - Comments: 0

Lam Research's David Haynes finds that taking advances made at 300mm and applying them via upgrades to 200mm equipment is a cost appropriate strategy to quickly improve yield and add capacity. Synopsys' Taylor Armerding looks at which of this year's many data breaches hit corporate wallets the hardest and how the cost of privacy noncompliance is expected to rise with California's CCPA and st... » read more

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