The Great Chip Shakeup


Facebook, Alibaba, Google, Apple and Samsung are all designing their own chips. So are Cisco and Huawei. So what exactly does this mean for big chipmakers and the semiconductor ecosystem? While your first impulse might be to draw a straight line between Qualcomm's decision to cut 1,500 jobs and reports about giant systems companies developing chips in-house, it's not clear there is any corre... » read more

Hidden Costs Of Shifting Left


The term "Shift Left" has been used increasingly within the semiconductor development flow to indicate tasks that were once performed sequentially must now be done concurrently. This is usually due to a tightening of dependences between tasks. One such example being talked about today is the need to perform hardware/software integration much earlier in the flow, rather than leaving it as a sequ... » read more

Next EUV Issue: Mask 3D Effects


As extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography moves closer to production, the industry is paying more attention to a problematic phenomenon called mask 3D effects. Mask 3D effects involve the photomask for EUV. In simple terms, a chipmaker designs an IC, which is translated from a file format into a photomask. The mask is a master template for a given IC design. It is placed in a lithography scan... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 25


Mentor's Cristian Filip digs into SerDes design with a focus on the adoption and evolution of Channel Operating Margin (COM) as a tool for ensuring compliance of high-speed designs and why it's useful even if its mathematical procedure might be intimidating at the beginning. Cadence's Paul McLellan explains the importance of IBIS and AMI standards for SerDes design and why the upcoming DDR5 ... » read more

Tech Tackles Health Care


Can technology make humans healthier? If technology investments in this market are any indication, the answer is a firm “yes.” Massive growth in this market has been predicted for years. In fact, it was the initial driver behind many of the initial IoT devices, which fizzled largely because of insufficiently developed end applications and poor battery life of wearable devices. Much has c... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Trade The trade tensions are building between the U.S. and China. In the latest move, the U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed a ban on U.S. companies selling chips to ZTE, a Chinese telecom equipment and mobile phone vendor. The ban has been implemented on ZTE for seven years after the firm “was caught illegally shipping U.S. goods to Iran,” according to a report from Reuters. This ... » read more

Searching For EUV Defects


Chipmakers hope to insert extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at 7nm and/or 5nm, but several challenges need to be solved before this oft-delayed technology can be used in production. One lingering issue that is becoming more worrisome is how to find defects caused by [gettech id="31045" comment="EUV"] processes. These processes can cause random variations, also known as stochastic effects... » read more

Blog Review: Apr. 18


Cadence's Meera Collier provides an overview of five emerging technologies that could drive the semiconductor industry in the future, from carbon nanotubes to quantum computing. Mentor's Colin Walls reminds embedded software developers of a few common sense tips, including better readability with braces in C/C++ and monitoring stack overflow. Synopsys' Tim Mackey rounds up the last few we... » read more

Choosing The Right Interconnect


Efforts to zero in on cheaper advanced packaging approaches that can speed time to market are being sidetracked by a dizzying number of choices. At the center of this frenzy of activity is the [getkc id="36" kc_name="interconnect"]. Current options range from organic, silicon and glass interposers, to bridges that span different die at multiple levels. There also are various fan-out approach... » read more

How To Choose The Right Memory


When it comes to designing memory, there is no such thing as one size fits all. And given the long list of memory types and usage scenarios, system architects must be absolutely clear on the system requirements for their application. A first decision is whether or not to put the memory on the logic die as part of the SoC, or keep it as off-chip memory. "The tradeoff between latency and th... » read more

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