Why DRAM Won’t Go Away


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about DRAM's future with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus; Marc Greenberg, group director for product marketing at Cadence; Graham Allan, senior product marketing manager for DDR PHYs at Synopsys; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory marketing at Samsung Electronics. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. Part ... » read more

112G XSR And LR SerDes PHYs


The virtuous cycle of increased computing power enabling new applications which demand more computing power continues unabated. Today, applications spanning AI, autonomous vehicles, video streaming, AR and VR all demand more bandwidth, lower latencies and higher speeds. In response, the SoCs powering the terabit routers and switches at the heart of the network must run even faster. The upgrade ... » read more

IP Requires System Context At 6/5/3nm


Driven by each successive generation of semiconductor manufacturing technology, complexity has reached dizzying levels. Every part of the design, verification and manufacturing is more complicated and intense the more transistors are able to be packed onto a die. For these reasons, the entire system must be taken into consideration as a whole – not just as individual building blocks as could ... » read more

GDDR6 – HBM2 Tradeoffs


Steven Woo, Rambus fellow and distinguished inventor, talks about why designers choose one memory type over another. Applications for each were clearly delineated in the past, but the lines are starting to blur. Nevertheless, tradeoffs remain around complexity, cost, performance, and power efficiency.   Related Video Latency Under Load: HBM2 vs. GDDR6 Why data traffic and bandw... » read more

The Promise Of GDDR6 And 7nm


Research Nester, a market research and consulting firm, estimates that the “global market of computer graphics may witness a remarkable growth and reach at the valuation of $215.5 billion by the end of year 2024.” Plus, it says this market is expected to grow at a significant compound annual growth rate or CAGR of 6.1% over the forecast period 2017 to 2024. Computer graphics is just the ... » read more

M2M’s Network Impact


Synopsys’ Manmeet Walia talks examines the impact of machine-to-machine traffic and why that requires some fundamental changes in networking architectures. Two key issues that need to be addressed are scalability and latency, which require new networking architectures. https://youtu.be/2RIQt3QVPtE » read more

IoT Wireless Battles Ahead


"The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from." – Andrew S. Tanebaum The extended version of that quote adds "furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for next year's model." That could not be truer when it comes to IoT and wireless connectivity. Every standards group is rushing to create new versions of existing standards that use less p... » read more

32GT/s PCI Express Design Considerations


Today’s networking and rapidly emerging artificial intelligence (AI) applications are requiring more bandwidth in accelerators and GPUs, as well as faster interconnects to transmit and receive greater amounts of data. Towards the middle of 2017 the PCI-SIG industry consortium announced its latest specification, PCIe 5.0, which raised the data rate from 16GT/s to 32GT/s and doubled the link... » read more

GDDR6 PHYs: From The Data Center To Self-Driving Cars


The demand for ever-increasing bandwidth has resulted in a growing interest in GDDR across a number of market verticals, including data centers and the automotive sector. As an example of the former, deep learning applications require ever-increasing speed and bandwidth memory solutions in the data center. In deep learning and other emerging technologies, GDDR memory can help companies addre... » read more

Noise Abatement


[getkc id="285" kc_name="Noise"] is a fact of life. Almost everything we do creates noise as a by-product and quite often what is a signal to one party is noise to another. Noise cannot be eliminated. It must be managed. But is noise becoming a larger issue in chips as the technology nodes get smaller and packaging becomes more complex? For some, the answer is a very strong yes, while for ot... » read more

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