Emulation-Driven Implementation


Tech Talk: Haroon Chaudhri, director of Prime Power at Synopsys, talks about how to shorten time to market and increase confidence in advanced-node designs, while also reducing the amount of guard-banding and improving design freedom. https://youtu.be/xT3CIqjnaBk » read more

Dealing With Resistance In Chips


Chipmakers continue to scale the transistor at advanced nodes, but they are struggling to maintain the same pace with the other two critical parts of the device—the contacts and interconnects. That’s beginning to change, however. In fact, at 10nm/7nm, chipmakers are introducing new topologies and materials such as cobalt, which promises to boost the performance and reduce unwanted resist... » read more

Upcoming System Modeling Challenges


In the past, during the concept phase of a design, system models have typically lacked information regarding reliability. If at all, reliability was addressed late in the design phase shortly before tape out. As the functional safety aspect, and with it an extended device lifetime, gains more and more attention for certain applications, things have to change in the design processes. To ensure a... » read more

Complexity, Reliability And Cost


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer's Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about future challenges in complexity, time to market and reliability issues, advanced packaging architectures, and the impact of billions of connected devices. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What is the biggest challenge you see in the semico... » read more

Ensuring Chip Reliability From The Inside


Monitoring activity and traffic is emerging as an essential ingredient in complex, heterogeneous chips used in automotive, industrial, and data center applications. This is particularly true in safety-critical applications such as automotive, where much depends on the system operating exactly right at all times. To make autonomous and assisted driving possible, a mechanism to ensure systems ... » read more

Higher Performance, Lower Power Everywhere


The future of technology is all about information—not just data—at our fingertips, anywhere and at any time. But making all of this work properly will require massive improvements in both performance and power efficiency. There are several distinct pieces to this picture. One is architectural, which is possibly the simplest to understand, the most technologically challenging to realize, ... » read more

Early Chip-Package-System Thermal Analysis


Next-generation automotive, HPC and networking applications are pushing the requirements of thermal integrity and reliability, as they need to operate in extreme conditions for extended periods of time. FinFET designs have high dynamic power density, and power directly impacts the thermal signature of the chip. Thermal degradation typically occurs over an extended period of chip operation. ... » read more

New Market Drivers


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changing market dynamics with Steve Mensor, vice president of marketing for [getentity id="22926" e_name="Achronix"]; Apurva Kalia, vice president of R&D in the System and Verification group of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Mohammed Kassem, CTO for [getentity id="22910" comment="efabless"]; Matthew Ballance, product engineer and techn... » read more

Designing 5G Chips


5G is the wireless technology of the future, and it’s coming fast. The technology boasts very high-speed data transfer rates, much lower latency than 4G LTE, and the ability to handle significantly higher densities of devices per cell site. In short, it is the best technology for the massive amount of data that will be generated by sensors in cars, IoT devices, and a growing list of next-g... » read more

Aging Models: The Basis For Predicting Circuit Reliability


Today, many products are based on high-performance electronic systems and integrated circuits (ICs), and the importance of these elements is ever-increasing. A certain tension arises here as these applications often call for a large amount of processing power and reliability. The processing power can best be supplied with highly scaled semiconductor technologies. However, these manufacturing te... » read more

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