Blog Review: Feb. 25


Cadence's Mick Posner introduces the Foundational Chiplet System Architecture, a specification that aims to deliver a vendor and CPU-neutral architecture, common system partition guidelines, and a shared vocabulary and set of standards for system-level and interface definitions between chiplets. Synopsys' Scott Knowlton explains why LPDDR6 represents a big step forward in memory management c... » read more

Backside Power Delivery Creates Fab Tool, Thermal Dissipation Barriers


Key Takeaways Backside power delivery reduces routing congestion at the most advanced nodes and offers significant performance improvement options. But it also adds a bunch of new challenges involving via alignment and interconnects. Still, leading-edge foundries are making progress, and all of them plan to offer BPDNs at 2nm and below. Backside power delivery networks deliv... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


The IEEE ISSCC conference was held this week in San Francisco. Among the highlights: IBM detailed an AI accelerator based on its new inferencing dataflow architecture. CEA-Leti presented a chip-scale, ultra-fast, battery-operated EPR spectrometer. QuTech introduced a cryo-CMOS SoC with NV centers in diamond. UTokyo showed its low-jitter PLL architecture for beyond 5G/6G. Imec d... » read more

Force Fields Will Accelerate Atomistic Simulations By 10,000× In 2026, Unlocking New Era Of Discovery


By Anders Blom and Igor Markov “Force fields” have long captured our imagination — the invisible shields of science-fiction lore that protect starships and superheroes from harm. But in the world of scientific discovery, force fields play a much different role: They are mathematical models that let us peer into the atomic heart of matter itself. Now, thanks to breakthroughs in artif... » read more

Laser Arrays May Simplify Co-Packaged Optics


Key Takeaways Moving photonic ICs into the same package as silicon helps improve performance, but lasers remain outside. A new monolithic laser array allows hundreds of colors, each individually software-tunable New options are being turned into products, which could help commercialize CPO. The move to co-packaged optics (CPO) holds the promise of putting photonic ICs (PICs)... » read more

When Cleaning Chips Isn’t Clean Enough


Key Takeaways Contamination is becoming much more difficult to identify at the most advanced nodes, forcing fabs to rethink how control is achieved. Issues may show up as electrical or statistical anomalies, not particles, and not at time zero. Reliable classification is needed to identify critical contamination and reduce time and effort spent on nuisance failures. For much... » read more

Enabling the Industry’s First GPU-Accelerated Manufacturing Platform


Discover how modern chip designs are revolutionizing the lithographic process, driving the need for innovative solutions to meet the industry's demand for shorter design cycles. This whitepaper explores the significant role of GPUs in accelerating computational lithography, offering unprecedented speed-ups for EDA tools in chip development. Learn about the collaborative efforts of Synopsys, NVI... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 18


Synopsys' Raja Tabet anticipates deployment of an agentic AI workforce within the next 12 to 24 months that can take on different engineering personas, such as a digital implementation agent, a verification agent, or an analog agent, to run experiments in parallel, generate and triage tests, and propose fixes. Cadence's Reela Samuel dives into power usage effectiveness in data centers and wh... » read more

Can A Computer Science Student Be Taught To Design Hardware?


Key Takeaways New approaches are being devised and tested to address the talent shortage. Leveraging AI in design tools will help engineers become more efficient, and potentially could reduce the time it takes to train engineering students. EDA companies are looking at whether it's possible to train computer science and software engineers to become hardware engineers. A vari... » read more

The Race Begins For Much Bigger Abstractions In Data Centers


Key Takeaways Data center build-out is enabling much larger and more complex abstractions. Competition is building for digital/virtual twins across multiple industry segments, including automotive, aerospace, and chip manufacturing. AI, and particularly AI agents, will play a significant role in sorting through data to find potential trouble spots. The frenzy of new data cen... » read more

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