How To Build Billions of Bumps


Key Takeaways: Hybrid bonding can result in a package containing billions (and eventually trillions) of connections. Building that many connections successfully requires extreme process uniformity across a wafer. Inspection isn’t practical, and test benefits from internal test mechanisms. Hybrid bonding allows unprecedented signal pitch, but fully populating dies and inter... » read more

A New Fracture Engine For Curvilinear Masks And MULTIGON Mask Data


Curvilinear masks are rapidly moving into high-volume production. This transition is driven by the need for better pattern fidelity, larger wafer process windows, and more effective use of inverse lithography technology (ILT) and curvilinear optical proximity correction (OPC). However, curvilinear masks also create a new challenge for mask data preparation (MDP): when curvilinear MULTIGON patte... » read more

How to Create Efficient Bump and TSV Plans for Multi-Die Designs


In a multi-die design logical and physical interconnectivity between dies (or a die and interposer or other substrate) is achieved through microbumps or hybrid bonding pads between contacting dies. Today’s multi-die designs can have hundreds of thousands or millions of bumps, and this number will be increasing dramatically in the future, as hybrid bonding technology greatly reduces the pi... » read more

Making On-Chip Photonics Manufacturable


Key Takeaways: System-level energy and bandwidth pressures are pulling optics into the package faster than the manufacturing flow can mature. Photonics combines front-end fabrication, materials, thermal, cleanliness, and test into one problem that can’t be solved domain by domain. Test is moving upstream because discovering an optical failure after final assembly forfeits every goo... » read more

Signoff Of Synthesis-Optimized Registers


How do you know when you sign off on a complex chip design that everything is going to work? There are more variables, more elements that need to be verified, and more waivers that need to be generated. Suresh Barla, senior director of field applications at Synopsys, talks about how to ensure that RTL is fully optimized for PPA targets in large designs that can include hundreds of millions of g... » read more

Designing Chips That Can Explain Themselves


Key Takeaways: On-die telemetry gives architects a path to replace worst-case design margin with measured silicon behavior, improving PPA without compromising resilience. As monitor density and control-loop speed increase, observability must be architected hierarchically across local hardware response, on-die processing, and fleet-level learning. The real payoff is architectural: str... » read more

Blog Review: June 17


Cadence's Rajan Jani explains NVMe's Controller Memory Buffer feature, which exposes on-controller memory directly to the host system to reduce latency, improve PCIe fabric efficiency, and increase performance in multi-switch topologies. Siemens' Linus Tauro shares how to run an SSN datapath at double the I/O data rate by implementing a BusFrequencyMultiplier and BusFrequencyDivider pair. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Notable deals Cadence and Intel Foundry inked a multi-year agreement to advance design technology co-optimization and create PDKs for Intel Foundry's 14A process. Nvidia and SK hynix announced a multi-year partnership to co-develop memory technology for AI infrastructure and physical AI. Teradyne unveiled an integrated test cell solution with TEL that supports known-good device scree... » read more

Agentic AI Is Changing Data Center Architectures


Key Takeaways: The rise of agentic AI is shifting data centers from GPU-centric number crunching to CPU-driven orchestration, where managing long-running reasoning loops and context is just as important as raw compute. Integrating CPUs, GPUs, and stacked memory into tightly coupled multi-die architectures with varying workloads makes it much harder to ensure they will be reliable and ef... » read more

Can AI Create Missing Models?


Key takeaways Models are an essential part of EDA flows, each capturing necessary detail while retaining good execution performance. Models have been expensive to create, maintain and verify, restricting their utilization, but AI may be able to significantly reduce their cost. A deeper question remains. Should AI be used to create models that help existing flows, or should AI be used... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →