New Approaches To Better Performance And Lower Power


By Ed Sperling Until 90nm, every feature shrink and rev of Moore’s Law included a side benefit of better power and performance. After that, improvements involved everything from different back-end processes to copper interconnects and transistor structures. But from 20nm onward, the future will rest with a combination of new materials, new architectures and new packaging approaches—and som... » read more

The Rise Of Semiconductor IP Subsystems


The semiconductor IP (SIP) market arose when SIP vendors created IP functions that mirrored those found in the discrete semiconductor market and made those functions available to SoC designers in the form of hard or soft SIP blocks. As the SoC and SIP markets evolved, it was a natural evolution that many discrete SIP functions be converged into larger blocks that mimic system-level functions (i... » read more

Foundry Talk


GlobalFoundries CEO Ajit Manocha sounds off on Foundry 2.0, 450mm wafers, lithography challenges, stacked die, the Internet of Things and the rush to the next process node. [youtube vid=WfjtlZkCi0w] » read more

Faster IP Integration


By Ed Sperling System-Level Design sat down with Laurent Moll, chief technology officer at Arteris, to talk about interoperability, complexity and integration issues. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SLD: What’s the big challenge with IP? Moll: Interoperability is always a concern. Because of ARM’s dominance, a lot of people are moving to AMBA protocols, whether that’... » read more

Experts At The Table: Changes In The Ecosystem


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Seow Yin Lim, group director for marketing at Cadence; Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys, and Tom Quan, director at TSMC. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: How are chipmakers working with the rest ... » read more

Experts At The Table: Changes In The Ecosystem


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Seow Yin Lim, group director for marketing at Cadence; Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys, and Tom Quan, director at TSMC. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: How are chipmakers working with the rest... » read more

Memory Gets Smarter


By Ed Sperling Look inside any complex SoC these days and the wiring congestion around memory is almost astounding. While the number of features on a chip is increasing, they are all built around the same memory modules. Logic needs memory, and in a densely packed semiconductor, the wires that connect the myriad logic blocks are literally all over the memory. This is made worse by the fact ... » read more

Faster Assembly Required


Speeding up production has been a mantra dating back throughout recorded history, and presumably well before that. That’s what technology was created for—roads, bridges aqueducts, computers, the Internet, and everything that connects the real to the virtual world. A speech by Nvidia chief scientist Bill Dally at DAC that complex SoCs should only take a couple weeks to design by two guys ... » read more

3D-IC Testing With The Mentor Graphics Tessent Platform


Three-dimensional stacked integrated circuits (3D-ICs) are composed of multiple stacked die, and are viewed as critical in helping the semiconductor industry keep pace with Moore's Law. Current integration and interconnect methods include wirebond and flip-chip and have been in production for some time. 3D chips connected via interposers are in production at Xilinx, Samsung, IBM, and Sematec... » read more

Marching Orders


Reports back from the front lines of Moore’s Law are rather consistent—14nm and 16nm finFETs are do-able, but they’re not easy to design, verify or manufacture. In fact, the only high-volume source of production-proven finFETs at this point is Intel, which is turning them out at 22nm. A number of issues are cropping up at the most advanced nodes, and while each is ultimately solvable, ... » read more

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