Demystifying MIPI C-PHY / D-PHY Subsystem


The newest member of the MIPI PHY family, the C-PHY, arrived in October 2014 to a mixture of excitement and apprehension. How would this new C-PHY compare to the MIPI D-PHY and M-PHY? What would differentiate the C-PHY, and would it be compatible enough with the D-PHY so that both could coexist in a hybrid subsystem? Now, years later, the answers are clear. This article will lay out... » read more

Enabling Cost-Effective, High-Performance Die-to-Die Connectivity


System advances in accelerated computing platforms such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs, heterogeneous systems on chip (SoCs) for AI acceleration and high-speed networking/interconnects have all pushed chip integration to unprecedented levels. This requires more complex designs and higher levels of integration, larger die sizes and adopting the most advanced geometries as quickly as possible. Facing th... » read more

Power Impact At The Physical Layer Causes Downstream Effects


Data movement is rapidly emerging as one of the top design challenges, and it is being complicated by new chip architectures and physical effects caused by increasing density at advanced nodes and in multi-chip systems. Until the introduction of the latest revs of high-bandwidth memory, as well as GDDR6, memory was considered the next big bottleneck. But other compute bottlenecks have been e... » read more

High-Speed SerDes At 7/5nm


Manmeet Walia, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, talks with Semiconductor Engineering about how to optimize PHYs for integration on all four corners of an SoC, as well as the PPA implications of moving large amounts of data across and around a chip. » read more

Which Chip Interconnect Protocol Is Better?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to the discuss the pros and cons of the Compute Express Link (CXL) and the Cache Coherent Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) with Kurt Shuler, vice president of marketing at Arteris IP; Richard Solomon, technical marketing manager for PCI Express controller IP at Synopsys; and Jitendra Mohan, CEO of Astera Labs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation... » read more

DDR PHY Training


Brett Murdock, senior product marketing manager at Synopsys, explains how to train the DRAM physical layer using firmware, why that is so important for flexibility, and what kinds of issues engineers encounter when using this approach. » read more

Die-to-Die Connectivity With High-Speed SerDes PHY IP


Hyperscale data center, artificial intelligence (AI), and networking SoCs have become more complex with advanced functionalities and have reached maximum reticle sizes. Designers are partitioning such SoCs in smaller modules requiring ultra- and extra-short reach links for inter-die connectivity with high data rates. The die-to-die connectivity must also ensure reliable links with extremely low... » read more

High-Performance Memory For AI And HPC


Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus, examines the current performance bottlenecks in high-performance computing, drilling down into power and performance for different memory options, and explains what are the best solutions for different applications and why. » read more

Accelerating Chiplets With 112G XSR SerDes PHYs


The fading of Moore’s Law and an almost exponential increase in data is challenging the semiconductor industry as never before. Indeed, zettabytes of data are constantly generated by a wide range of devices including IoT endpoints such as vehicles, wearables, smartphones and appliances. Moreover, sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) applications are adding new ... » read more

Pushing Memory Harder


In an optimized system, no component is waiting for another component while there is useful work to be done. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the processor/memory interface. Put simply, memory cannot keep up. Accessing memory is slow, and it can consume a significant fraction of the power budget. And the general consensus is this problem is not going away anytime soon, despite effort... » read more

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