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

Blog Review: Mar. 12


Cadence's P. Saisrinivas explains the relationship between drive strength and cell delay and why it is key to choose the appropriate drive strength to meet timing constraints while minimizing power and area. Siemens' Daniel Berger and Dirk Hartmann tackle the readout problem of accurately measuring the state of a quantum system after it has undergone a quantum computation, which becomes incr... » read more

Automation And AI Improve Failure Analysis


When a chip malfunctions it’s the job of the failure analysis engineer to determine how it failed or significantly deviated from its key performance metrics. The cost of failure in the field can be huge in terms of downtime, recalls, damage to a company’s reputation, and more. For these reasons, chipmakers take customer returns very seriously, focusing resources to quickly get to the bot... » read more

Unlocking The Value Of Yield


Have you stopped to consider the impact of yield on your overall product cost? Of course you did, when you considered your yield targets and set your product goals. But is it good enough to stop once the goals are achieved, or should you find ways to drive additional value into your organization once production has begun? What is the value of a 1% improvement in product yield? The short answer ... » read more

Reversible Chain Diagnosis


For advanced technologies, the industry is seeing very complicated silicon defect types and defect distribution. One consequence is that scan chain diagnosis becomes more difficult. To improve the resolution of scan chain diagnosis, Tessent Diagnosis can use new scan chain test patterns to leverage a reversible scan chain architecture. This paper describes the novel scan chain architecture t... » read more

Failure To Launch


Failure analysis (FA) is an essential step for achieving sufficient yield in semiconductor manufacturing, but it’s struggling to keep pace with smaller dimensions, advanced packaging, and new power delivery architectures. All of these developments make defects harder to find and more expensive to fix, which impacts the reliability of chips and systems. Traditional failure analysis techniqu... » read more

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