Blog Review: May 21


Synopsys’ Frank Malloy listens in on a panel discussing the engineering challenges introduced by multi-die designs, from multi-physics interactions that impact power and thermal integrity to the availability of multi-die packages and industry standards. Siemens’ Bruce Caryl shows how to determine how much a design’s power delivery network is contributing to jitter on the output drivers... » read more

More Data, More Redundant Interconnects


The proliferation of AI dramatically increases the amount of data that needs to be processed, stored, and moved, accelerating the aging of signal paths through which that data travels and forcing chipmakers to build more redundancy into the interconnects. In the past, nearly all redundant data paths were contained within a planar chip using a relatively thick silicon substrate. But as chipma... » read more

Die-to-die Interconnect Standards In Flux


UCIe, a standard for die-to-die interconnect in advanced packages, has drawn concern about being too heavyweight with its 2.0 release. But the fact that many of the new features are optional seems to have been lost in much of the public discussion. In fact, new capabilities that support a possible future chiplet marketplace are not required for designs that don’t target that marketplace. ... » read more

High-Speed Test IO: Addressing High-Performance Data Transmission And Testing Needs For HPC & AI


By Lakshmi Jain and Wei-Yu Ma The AI and HPC industries are rapidly shifting toward chiplet-based designs to achieve unprecedented levels of performance, as traditional monolithic system-on-chip (SoC) architectures face scaling limitations. This transition is fueled by the rise of heterogeneous integration, which is driving innovation across the semiconductor sector. However, this advancemen... » read more

Development Flows For Chiplets


Chiplets offer a huge leap in semiconductor functionality and productivity, just like soft IP did 40 years ago, but a lot has to come together before that becomes reality. It takes an ecosystem, which is currently very rudimentary. Today, many companies have hit the reticle limit and are forced to move to multi-die solutions, but that does not create a plug-and-play chiplet market. These ear... » read more

AI Accelerators Moving Out From Data Centers


Experts At The Table: The explosion in AI data is driving chipmakers to look beyond a single planar SoC. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the need for more computing and the expanding role of chiplets with Marc Meunier, director of ecosystem development at Arm; Jason Lawley, director of product marketing for AI IP at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketing at Expedera; ... » read more

Blog Review: May 14


Siemens’ Stephen V. Chavez finds that proper PCB high voltage spacing between conductive elements is key to reliability and understanding the principles of clearance (through-air spacing) and creepage (along-surface spacing) is critical. Cadence’s Frank Ferro checks out how the new HBM4 standard boosts bandwidth and addresses key issues in the data center, including the growing size of L... » read more

Security Risks Mount For Aerospace, Defense Applications


Supply chain and hardware security vulnerabilities affect all industries, but they pose additional risks for the defense sector. Over-manufacturing and re-manufacturing allow chips from friendly nations to end up in the weapons of adversaries. And side-channel attacks such as power analysis or fault injection, as well as internet-based distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, provide a mea... » read more

Better ATPG To Minimize Chip Test Time And Cost


As chips get ever bigger and more complex, the electronic design automation (EDA) industry must innovate constantly to keep up. Engineers expect every new generation of silicon to be modeled, simulated, laid out, and checked in about the same time with the same effort, despite the growth in die size and density. One area of particular focus is manufacturing test. Any effort expended to reduce t... » read more

Identifying Sources Of Silent Data Corruption


Silent data errors are raising concerns in large data centers, where they can propagate through systems and wreak havoc on long-duration programs like AI training runs. SDEs, also called silent data corruption, are technically rare. But with many thousands of servers, which contain millions of processors running at high utilization rates, these damaging events become common in large fleets. ... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →