Blog Review: Oct. 12


Synopsys' Richard Solomon, Madhumita Sanyal, and Gary Ruggles take a look at the possibilities that CXL 3.0 can bring to a variety of data-driven applications that demand increasingly higher levels of memory capacity, with higher bandwidth, more security, and lower latency. Siemens EDA's Rich Edelman provides some tips for debugging UVM testbenches, such as how to determine what line changed... » read more

Why Silent Data Errors Are So Hard To Find


Cloud service providers have traced the source of silent data errors to defects in CPUs — as many as 1,000 parts per million — which produce faulty results only occasionally and under certain micro-architectural conditions. That makes them extremely hard to find. Silent data errors (SDEs) are random defects produced in manufacturing, not a design bug or software error. Those defects gene... » read more

Yield Is Top Issue For MicroLEDs


MicroLED display makers are marching toward commercialization, with products such as Samsung’s The Wall TV and Apple’s smart watch expected to be in volume production next year or in 2024. These tiny illuminators are the hot new technology in the display world, enabling higher pixel density, better contrast, lower power consumption, and higher luminance in direct sunlight — while consu... » read more

Security For SoC Interfaces Takes Center Stage In Data Protection


Due to today’s connected world, a high volume of valuable data, susceptible to tampering and physical attacks, is processed, stored, and moved between devices, cars, and data centers. And the number of connections continues to grow. Even with supply chain disruptions and the overarching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on chip manufacturing, the number of global IoT connections grew by 8% in ... » read more

Digitizing Memory Design And Verification To Accelerate Development Turnaround Time


By Anand Thiruvengadam, Farzin Rasteh, Preeti Jain, and Jim Schultz Some digital design and verification engineers imagine that their colleagues working on analog/mixed-signal (AMS) chips are jealous. After all, the digital development flow has enjoyed the benefits of increased automation and higher levels of abstraction for many years. Hand-instantiated devices and manual interconnection we... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Micron selected Syracuse, New York as the site for its new megafab complex, which is expected to create 9,000 company jobs and 40,000 construction and supply chain jobs. President Biden called it “another win for America.” The chip manufacturing facility will be the nation’s largest, including a 7.2 million square foot complex and 2.4 million square foot of cleanroom. Site preparation wil... » read more

Week in Review: Design, Low Power


Could power beams be the key to smart city infrastructure and 5G/6G connectivity? A new report says both lasers and microwaves offer possible paths forward in this area, though both technologies come with benefits and drawbacks. Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are desi... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive, mobility Infineon opened a new factory in Cegléd, Hungary, for assembly and test of high-power semiconductor modules for EVs. “The new manufacturing capacities will help Infineon accommodate the growing demand for electromobility applications,” said Infineon’s COO Rutger Wijburg in a press release. Production ramp-up started in February 2022. Infineon also announced it will ... » read more

EVs Raise Energy, Power, And Thermal IC Design Challenges


The transition to electric vehicles is putting pressure on power grids to produce more energy and on vehicles to use that energy much more efficiently, creating a gargantuan set of challenges that will affect every segment of the automotive world, the infrastructure that supports it, and the chips that are required to make all of this work. From a semiconductor standpoint, improvements in th... » read more

Testing Chips For Security


Supply chains and manufacturing processes are becoming increasingly diverse, making it much harder to validate the security in complex chips. To make matters worse, it can be challenging to justify the time and expense to do so, and there’s little agreement on the ideal metrics and processes involved. Still, this is particularly important as chip architectures evolve from a single chip dev... » read more

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