Droop And Silent Data Corruption


By Aakash Jani and Lee Vick Let me set the scene. You are a child psychologist (played by, let’s say, Bruce Willis for illustrative purposes), and you are sitting next to a frightened kid. He turns to you and whispers, “I see dead bits.” Okay, I grant you that’s not exactly the quote, but data center operators are seeing transient errors at an alarming rate, and at scale. These error... » read more

IC Test And Quality Requirements Drive New Collaboration


Rapidly increasing chip and package complexity, coupled with an incessant demand for more reliability, has triggered a frenzy of alliances and working relationships that are starting to redefine how chips are tested and monitored. At the core of this shift is a growing recognition that no company can do everything, and that to work together will require much tighter integration of flows, met... » read more

Ensuring The Health And Reliability Of Multi-Die Systems


From generative AI tools that rapidly produce chatbot responses to high-performance computing (HPC) applications enabling financial forecasting and weather modeling, it’s clear we’re in a whole new realm of processing power demand. Given these compute-intensive workloads, monolithic SoCs are no longer capable to meet today’s processing needs. Engineering ingenuity, however, has answered t... » read more

Shift Left, Extend Right, Stretch Sideways


The EDA industry has been talking about shift left for a few years, but development flows are now being stretched in two additional ways, extending right to include silicon lifecycle management, and sideways to include safety and security. In addition, safety and security join verification and power as being vertical concerns, and we are increasingly seeing interlinking within those concerns. ... » read more

The Ever-Increasing Role Of PVT Monitor IP And Its Significance In Silicon Lifecycle Management


The demand for semiconductor chips has grown exponentially over the years, driven by advancements in technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, 5G, automotive and cloud. With this increased demand, there is a growing need for more reliable semiconductor chips that can operate under extreme conditions and withstand the rigors of modern applications. Here are some of th... » read more

Optimizing Scan Test For Complex ICs


As chips become more heterogeneous with more integrated functionality, testing them presents increasing challenges — particularly for high-speed system-on-chip (SoC) designs with limited test pin availability. In addition, the complexity of emerging packages like 3D and chiplets necessitates comprehensive new solutions that can provide faster results at multiple stages in the silicon lifec... » read more

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers


The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance


The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

Automotive Applications Demand Silicon Lifecycle Management


Every electrical engineer learns early in university studies that automobiles are a highly demanding environment for electronics. Temperature and humidity extremes, noise and vibration, electrical interference, exposure to alpha particles, and other factors all make it hard to design and manufacture chips that will operate properly under all conditions. These challenges are exacerbated as chips... » read more

Bridging IC Design, Manufacturing, And In-Field Reliability


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about silicon lifecycle management and how that can potentially glue together design, manufacturing, and devices in the field, with Prashant Goteti, principal engineer at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; Zoe Conroy, principal hardware engineer at Cisco; Subhasish Mitra, professor of electrical engineering and computer sci... » read more

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