Using Analytics To Reduce Burn-in


Silicon providers are using adaptive test flows to reduce burn-in costs, one of the many approaches aimed at stemming cost increases at advanced nodes and in advanced packages. No one likes it when their cell phone fails within the first month of ownership. But the problems are much more pressing when the key components in data warehouse servers or automobiles fail. Reliability expectations ... » read more

Machine Learning Approach for Fast Electromigration Aware Aging Prediction in Incremental Design of Large Scale On-Chip Power Grid Network


Abstract "With the advancement of technology nodes, Electromigration (EM) signoff has become increasingly difficult, which requires a considerable amount of time for an incremental change in the power grid (PG) network design in a chip. The traditional Black’s empirical equation and Blech’s criterion are still used for EM assessment, which is a time-consuming process. In this article, for ... » read more

PowerPlanningDL: Reliability-Aware Framework for On-Chip Power Grid Design using Deep Learning


Academic research paper from Dept. of CSE, IIT Guwahatim, India. Abstract: "With the increase in the complexity of chip designs, VLSI physical design has become a time-consuming task, which is an iterative design process. Power planning is that part of the floorplanning in VLSI physical design where power grid networks are designed in order to provide adequate power to all the underlying ... » read more

Variation Threat In Advanced Nodes, Packages Grows


Variation is becoming a much bigger and more complex problem for chipmakers as they push to the next process nodes or into increasingly dense advanced packages, raising concerns about the functionality and reliability of individual devices, and even entire systems. In the past, almost all concerns about variation focused on the manufacturing process. What printed on a piece of silicon didn't... » read more

Revealing DRAM Operating GuardBands through Workload-Aware Error Predictive Modeling


Abstract Abstract—Improving the energy efficiency of DRAMs becomes very challenging due to the growing demand for storage capacity and failures induced by the manufacturing process. To protect against failures, vendors adopt conservative margins in the refresh period and supply voltage. Previously, it was shown that these margins are too pessimistic and will become impractical due to high ... » read more

Predicting Reliability At 3/2nm And Beyond


The chip industry is determined to manufacture semiconductors at 3/2nm — and maybe even beyond — but it's unlikely those chips will be the complex all-in-one SoCs that have defined advanced electronics over the past decade or so. Instead, they likely will be one of many tiles in a system that define different functions, the most important of which are highly specialized for a particular app... » read more

Silicon Lifecycle Management


How do you track, measure and ensure reliability over the lifetime of a chip, regardless of how or where it is used? Steve Pateras, senior director of marketing for test products at Synopsys, drills down into the impact of hardware-software co-design, over-the-air updates, the expected lifetime of designs, and how the various monitors and sensors are used to track environmental, structural and ... » read more

Using AI And Bugs To Find Other Bugs


Debug is starting to be rethought and retooled as chips become more complex and more tightly integrated into packages or other systems, particularly in safety- and mission-critical applications where life expectancy is significantly longer. Today, the predominant bug-finding approaches use the ubiquitous constrained random/coverage driven verification technology, or formal verification techn... » read more

Structural Integrity Of Chips


A new challenge is on the horizon, and it's one that could have some interesting consequences for chip design — structural integrity. Ever since the introduction of finFETs and 3D NAND, the lines have been blurring between electrical and mechanical engineering. After some initial reports of fins collapsing or breaking, and variable distances between layers, chipmakers figured out how to so... » read more

Selective Redundancy In Cars


The automotive industry has been fish-tailing its way through design strategies and electronics architectures, but it finally appears to be honing in on a strategy that actually might work. This doesn't mean fully autonomous vehicles will take over the road anytime soon, but at least it points carmakers in the right direction. The auto industry has been in panic mode ever since Tesla, Waymo,... » read more

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