Cracking The Memory Wall


Processor performance continues to improve exponentially, with more processor cores, parallel instructions, and specialized processing elements, but it is far outpacing improvements in bandwidth and memory. That gap, the so-called memory wall, has persisted throughout most of this century, but now it is becoming more pronounced. SRAM scaling is slowing at advanced nodes, which means SRAM takes ... » read more

Variability Becoming More Problematic, More Diverse


Process variability is becoming more problematic as transistor density increases, both in planar chips and in heterogeneous advanced packages. On the basis of sheer numbers, there are many more things that can wrong. “If you have a chip with 50 billion transistors, then there are 50 places where a one-in-a-billion event can happen,” said Rob Aitken, a Synopsys fellow. And if Intel’s... » read more