Blog Review: Mar. 26


Siemens' Bianca Ward argues that sustainability must be considered starting from the design phase to reduce the energy consumption of ICs as well as the production processes used to manufacture them. Synopsys' Adrien Tozzoli looks at how physical optics simulation can be improved by using beam synthesis propagation, a method that decomposes the optical field into a collection of beamlets to ... » read more

What Exactly Are Chiplets And Heterogeneous Integration?


The terms “chiplet” and “heterogeneous integration” fill news pages, conference papers, and marketing presentations, and for the most part engineers understand what they're reading. But speakers sometimes stumble during a presentation trying to figure out whether a particular die qualifies as a chiplet, and heterogeneous integration comes in different guises for different people. Both t... » read more

Chip Failures: Prevention And Responses Over Time


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the causes of chip failures, how to respond to them, and how that can change over time, with Steve Pateras, vice president of marketing and business development at Synopsys; Noam Brousard, vice president of solutions engineering at proteanTecs; Harry Foster, chief verification scientist at Siemens EDA; and Jerome Toublanc, hi... » read more

Blog Review: Mar. 19


Cadence's Neelabh Singh explains the defined port operations of USB4 that are used to bring transmitters burst and receivers of a design under test into compliance mode and to execute tests like bit error tests, error rate tests, clock switch tests, TxFFE equalization tests, and electrical idle tests. Siemens EDA's Stephen V. Chavez examines the use of blind and buried vias in high-density i... » read more

New Data Center Protocols Tackle AI


Compute nodes in AI and HPC data centers increasingly need to reach out beyond the chip or package for additional resources to process growing workloads. They may commandeer other nodes in a rack (scale-up) or employ resources in other racks (scale-out). The problem is there currently is no open scale-up protocol. So far this task has been dominated by proprietary protocols, because much of ... » read more

Fulfilling 3D-IC Trade-Off Analyses (And Benefits) With An AI Assist


As we walk around with supercomputers in our pockets and work at desks on even more powerful supercomputers, a lot of processing has moved to the cloud. As a politician described, this can be problematic on a day when there are no clouds in the sky. The world discovered the truth of those words when Crowdstrike struck on July 19, 2024. System designers who spent years balancing power, performan... » read more

3D-IC For The Masses


The concepts of 3D-IC and chiplets have the whole industry excited. It potentially marks the next stage in the evolution of the IP industry, but so far, technical difficulties and cost have curtailed its usage to just a handful of companies. Even within those, they do not appear to be seeing benefits from heterogeneous integration or reuse. Attempts to make this happen are not new. "A decade... » read more

Chiplets Add New Power Issues


Delivering and managing power are becoming key challenges in the rollout of chiplets, adding significantly to design complexity and forcing chipmakers to weigh tradeoffs that can have a big impact on the performance, reliability, and the overall cost of semiconductors. Power is a concern for every chip and chiplet design, even if the specifics differ based on the application. Systems vendors... » read more

Integrating Data From Design, Manufacturing, And The Field


Chip design is starting to include more options to ensure chips behave reliably in the field, boosting the ability to tweak both hardware and software as chips age. The basic problem is that as dimensions become smaller, and as more features are added into devices — especially with heterogeneous assemblies of chiplets running some type of AI — the potential for thermally induced structur... » read more

New Innovative Way To Functionally Verify Heterogeneous 2D/3D Package Connectivity


Historically, IC package design has been a relatively simple task which allowed the die bumps to be fanned out to a geometry suitable for connecting to a printed circuit board. The package netlist was often captured by the package designer, typically using Excel to manually assign net names to the desired die bumps and BGA balls to achieve the intended connection. Modern package and interpos... » read more

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