Heat-Related Issues Impact Reliability In Advanced IC Designs


Heat is becoming a much bigger problem in advanced-node chips and packages, causing critical electrons to leak out of DRAM, timing and reliability issues in 3D-ICs, and accelerated aging that are unique to different workloads. All types of circuitry are vulnerable to thermal effects. It can slow the movement of the electrons through wires, cause electromigration that shortens the lifespan of... » read more

PCIe 7.0: Speed, Flexibility & Efficiency For The AI Era


As the industry came together for PCI-SIG DevCon last month, one thing took center stage, and that was PCI Express 7.0. While still in the final stages of development, the world is certainly ready for this significant new milestone of the PCIe specification. Let’s look at how PCIe 7.0 is poised to address the escalating demands of AI, high-performance computing, and emerging data-intensive ap... » read more

Data Center Thermal Management Improves


Thermal issues are plaguing semiconductor design at every level, from chips developed with single-digit nanometer processes to 100,000-square-foot data centers. The underlying cause is too many devices or services that require increasing amounts of power, and too few opportunities for the resulting heat to dissipate. “Everybody wants to try to do more in a small volume of space,” said St... » read more

Securing AI Silicon


The importance of security in AI training/inference silicon is increasing in awareness. Over the past several months, I’ve noticed many questions in common from various parts of the microelectronic industry. In this blog post, I’ll share my thoughts on some of these most frequently asked questions. Firstly, people often ask if securing AI silicon is different from securing other types of... » read more

Security Focus Widens To HW, SW, Ecosystems


Hardware security strategies are pushing much further left in the chip design flow as the number of vulnerabilities in complex designs and connected devices continues to grow, taking into account potential vulnerabilities in both hardware and software, as well as the integrity of an extended global supply chain. These approaches leverage the speed of fixing problems in software, and the effe... » read more

LPDDR Memory Is Key For On-Device AI Performance


Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) emerged as a specialized high performance, low power memory for mobile phones. Since its first release in 2006, each new generation of LPDDR has delivered the bandwidth and capacity needed for major shifts in the mobile user experience. Once again, LPDDR is at the forefront of another key shift as the next wave of generative AI applications will be built into ... » read more

IC Industry’s Growing Role In Sustainability


The massive power needs of AI systems are putting a spotlight on sustainability in the semiconductor ecosystem. The chip industry needs to be able to produce more efficient and lower-power semiconductors. But demands for increased processing speed are rising with the widespread use of large language models and the overall increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed. Gartner estima... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Samsung unveiled its latest 2nm and 4nm process nodes, plus its AI solutions during the Samsung Foundry Forum. The company also introduced an aggressive roadmap for the next few years that includes 3D-ICs with logic-on-logic, starting in 2025; custom HBM with built-in logic; backside power delivery on 2nm technology in 2027; and co-packaged optics. In presentations at the event, the company als... » read more

Temperature: A Growing Concern For Chip Security Experts


While everyone in the semiconductor industry wants to have the hottest new product, having that type of temperature manifest in a literal sense poses a threat not just to product stability and performance but to the security of the chips themselves. Temperature has become an object of fascination to security researchers due to the vagaries of how the physical properties of heat affect perfor... » read more

New Approaches Needed For Power Management


Power is becoming a bigger concern as the amount of data being processed continues to grow, forcing chipmakers and systems companies to rethink compute architectures from the end point all the way to the data center. There is no simple fix to this problem. More data is being collected, moved, and processed, requiring more power at every step, and more attention to physical effects such as he... » read more

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