Looking Beyond Moore’s Law


For decades, chip scaling has followed a simple linear curve. In this curve, the transistor gate-pitch scales at 0.7x every two years. This is the driving force behind Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors per chip roughly doubles every two years. But starting at the 16nm/14nm node, there is a change taking place in chip scaling. According to a chart from Imec, there are... » read more

Strategies To Prevent IC Failures In Volume Production


When IC devices are produced and shipped to end customers, it is important that they will function as specified in the application environment. This paper outlines strategies and practices used to statistically sample, and predict how a device will operate over time. The practices outlined are believed to be best in class techniques for a successful product launch. These strategies most likely ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Retrofitting Older Process Nodes


By Ed Sperling Low-Power Engineering sat down with Walter Ng, vice president of the IP ecosystem at GlobalFoundries; Vishal Kapoor, vice president of marketing for SoC realization at Cadence; Naveed Sherwani, CEO of Open-Silicon; John Heinlein, vice president of marketing at ARM; and Jeff Lukanc, director of engineering at IDT. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which was held in... » read more

A Well-Engineered Leap Of Faith


The economics of engineering chips are changing again. We’ve been hearing for several process nodes about runaway non-recurring engineering costs and the rising costs of masks and how Moore’s Law would meet an abrupt end because no one could afford to stay the course. And while it’s true that not everyone did stay the course, the solution has turned out less onerous than many predi... » read more

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