Auto Ecosystem Begins Shift To Software-First


Experts at the Table: The automotive ecosystem is in the midst of an intense evolution as OEMs and tiered providers grapple with how to deal with legacy technology while incorporating ever-increasing levels of autonomy, electrification, and software-defined vehicle concepts. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these and other related issues with Wayne Lyons, senior director for the au... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Updated for 12/20 government fundings and 12/23 for China trade investigation announcements. President Biden announced a trade investigation into "China's unfair trade practices in the semiconductor sector."  The announcement stated "PRC semiconductors often enter the U.S. market as a component of finished goods. This Section 301 investigation will examine a broad range of the PRC’s non-m... » read more

Strain, Stress In Advanced Packages Drives New Design Approaches


Thermal and mechanical stresses are creating significant challenges in heterogeneous chiplet assemblies, increasing the time and cost required to work through all the possible physical effects, dependencies, and interactions, and driving demand for new tools. Unlike in the past, when various components were crammed into a planar SoC on a relatively thick substrate, the new substrates are bei... » read more

Improving Verification Performance


Without methodology improvements, verification teams would not be able keep up with the growing complexity and breadth of the tasks assigned to them. Tools alone will not provide the answer. The magnitude of the verification task continues to outpace the tools, forcing design teams to seek out better ways to intermix and utilize the tools that are available. But as verification teams take on... » read more

SLM Evolves Into Critical Aspect Of Chip Design And Operation


Silicon lifecycle management has evolved greatly in the past five years, moving from novel concept to a key part of design flows at industry leaders such as NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, Ericsson, and others. Along with becoming a major focus for companies developing semiconductors, the use cases have expanded. While initially focused on post-silicon insights, SLM has expanded to cover the en... » read more

Achieving Successful Multi-Die Signoff


Multi-die designs leveraging 2.5D and 3D technologies are becoming crucial for various electronics applications, including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), automotive, and mobile devices. These designs allow the integration of dies from different foundries and technology nodes, enhancing density and interconnect speeds beyond traditional discrete dies. However, th... » read more

Blog Review: Dec. 18


Siemens’ Michael Munsey predicts that the convergence of AI, advanced packaging, and rise of software-defined products aren’t just incremental changes but will represent a fundamental shift in how we think about semiconductor design and manufacturing. Cadence's Veena Parthan points to hex-core voxels as a significant leap forward for the CFD meshing process that blends the best of struct... » read more

RISC-V Profiles Help Conformance


Experts At The Table: What's needed to be able to trust that a RISC-V implementation will work as expected across multiple designs using standard OSes. Semiconductor Engineering discussed the issue with John Min, vice president of customer service at Arteris; Zdeněk Přikryl, CTO of Codasip; Neil Hand, director of marketing at Siemens EDA (at the time of this discussion); Frank Schirrmeist... » read more

TCAD Simulation Challenges For Gate-All-Around Transistors


By Victor Moroz and Shela Aboud The transition from finFET technology to Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology helps to reduce transistor variability and resume channel length scaling. It also brings several new challenges in terms of transistor design that need to be addressed. One of the challenges is handling the thin Si layers that come with GAA technology, where Si channel thickness scale... » read more

Baby Steps Toward 3D DRAM


Flash memory has made incredible capacity strides thanks to monolithic 3D processing enabled by the stacking of more than 200 layers, which is on its way to 1.000 layers in future generations.[1] But the equally important DRAM has achieved a similar manufacturable 3D architecture. The need for a sufficiently large means of storing charge — such as a capacitor — has proved elusive. Severa... » read more

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