Bump Reliability is Challenged By Latent Defects


Thermal stress is a well-known problem in advanced packaging, along with the challenges of mechanical stress. Both are exacerbated by heterogenous integration, which often requires mingling materials with incompatible coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE). Effects are already showing up and will likely only get worse as package densities increase beyond 1,000 bumps per chip. “You comb... » read more

Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance


The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

Chip Industry’s Earnings Roundup


Editor's Note: Updated throughout February 2023 for additional earnings releases. Many companies reported revenue growth in the most recent quarter, but the latest round of chip industry earnings releases reflected some major themes: Demand for consumer electronics softened due to inflation, rising interest rates, and post-pandemic market saturation, creating a slump in the memory chip ... » read more

Building Better Cars Faster


Carmakers are accelerating their chip and electronic design schedules to remain competitive in an increasingly fast-changing market, but they are encountering gaps in the tooling, the supply chain, and in the methodologies they use to create those cars. While it's easy to envision how CAD software could be used to create the next new vehicle’s 3-D look, and how simulation software helps de... » read more

Protecting High-Speed Network Traffic With MACsec


By Dana Neustadter and Jerry Lotto There is an ever-increasing demand for bandwidth, driven by an exponential growth in the number of devices connected to the cloud and a broadening variety of sensors, applications, and services, resulting in an explosion of data traffic. This in turn, drives the proliferation of high bandwidth interfaces such as Ethernet, PCIe/CXL, and DDR to sustain faster... » read more

Solving Problems With The IoT


The Internet of Things, a term once applied to almost any "smart" gadget connected to the Internet, is becoming more useful, more complex, and more of a security risk as the value of data continues to grow and more people depend on IoT technology. In the decades since the concept was first introduced, IoT devices have become so ubiquitous that applications cover practically every consumer, c... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 1


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster explores trends in low power design techniques for ICs and ASICs, with 72% of design projects reported actively managing power. Synopsys' Charlie Matar, Rita Horner, and Pawini Mahajan look at the concept of reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) in the context of high-performance computing SoC designs and how it can be supported with silicon lifecycle... » read more

Scan Pattern Portability From PSV To ATE To SLT To IST


By Ash Patel and Karthik Natarajan Chip testing has become increasingly complex due to the number of variables impacting designs – from design size and complexity, to high transistor counts on advanced technology nodes, to 2.5D/3D packaging, to manufacturing variability. All of these combine to make testing today's chips and packages more complicated than ever before. The number of test pa... » read more

Benefits Of A Silicon-Proven 800G Ethernet Solution For High-Performance Computing


The evolution of high-speed Ethernet began in 2014 when Arista, Broadcom, Microsoft, Mellanox and Google formed the Ethernet Consortium, now called the “Ethernet Technology Consortium.” Since then, the technology has been adopted by more than 45 members. The push for 200G, then 400G, and now 800G Ethernet is driven by the insatiable need to process and transmit high-performance workloads in... » read more

Power Issues Causing More Respins At 7nm And Below


Power consumption has been a major design consideration for some time, but it is far from being a solved issue. In fact, an increasing number of designs have a plethora of power-related problems, and those problems are getting worse in new chip designs. Many designs today are power-limited — or perhaps more accurately stated, thermal-limited. A chip only can consume as much power as it is ... » read more

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