Chip Architectures Becoming Much More Complex With Chiplets

By Ed Sperling and Ann Mutschler - 30 Jan, 2025 - Comments: 0

The migration from monolithic SoCs to chiplet-based designs is creating a confusing array of options and tradeoffs for design teams working at the leading edge, and the number of choices is only going to increase as third-party chiplets begin pouring into the market. That hasn't dampened the appetite for chiplets, however, which are deemed essential for future generations of semiconductors f... » read more

Issues In Calculating Glitch Power

By Ed Sperling - 11 Oct, 2023 - Comments: 0

The amount of power consumed by redundant non-functional toggles, or glitch power, can be as high as 35% of total power consumption in a design. What can be done about that? Godwin Maben, low-power architect and scientist at Synopsys, takes a deep dive into the causes of glitch, how it is affected by new process nodes and heterogeneous integration, and the impact of different workloads, higher ... » read more

Solving Thermal Coupling Issues In Complex Chips

By Ann Mutschler - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

Rising chip and packaging complexity is causing a proportionate increase in thermal couplings, which can reduce performance, shorten the lifespan of chips, and impact overall reliability of chips and systems. Thermal coupling is essentially a junction between two devices, such as a chip and a package, or a transistor and a substrate, in which heat is transferred from one to the other. If not... » read more

Balancing Power And Heat In Advanced Chip Designs

By Karen Heyman - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Power and heat use to be someone else's problem. That's no longer the case, and the issues are spreading as more designs migrate to more advanced process nodes and different types of advanced packaging. There are a number of reasons for this shift. To begin with, there are shrinking wire diameters, thinner dielectrics, and thinner substrates. The scaling of wires requires more energy to driv... » read more

How To Compare Chips

By Ed Sperling - 15 Sep, 2022 - Comments: 0

Traditional metrics for semiconductors are becoming much less meaningful in the most advanced designs. The number of transistors packed into a square centimeter only matters if they can be utilized, and performance per watt is irrelevant if sufficient power cannot be delivered to all of the transistors. The consensus across the chip industry is that the cost per transistor is rising at each ... » read more

Memory Subsystems In Edge Inferencing Chips

By Ed Sperling - 23 Sep, 2019 - Comments: 0

Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix, talks about key issues in a memory subsystem in an inferencing chip, how factors like heat can affect performance, and where these kinds of chips will be used. » read more

Toshiba Verifies Thermal Contribution In Motor Control Driver ICs

By Mentor, a Siemens Business - 05 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 0

High output current ICs usually generate a lot of heat from the driver transistor, which affects the surrounding circuits. Therefore, it is important to take into account the transient heat based on the output current level when designing applications such as engine throttles or on/off switches for engine bulbs. In this whitepaper, the Toshiba team discusses how they used the Eldo circuit simul... » read more

Latency Under Load: HBM2 vs. GDDR6

By Ed Sperling - 09 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Steven Woo, Rambus fellow and distinguished inventor, explains why data traffic and bandwidth are critical to choosing the type of DRAM, options for improving traffic flow in different memory types, and how this works with multiple memory types. Related Video GDDR6 - HBM2 Tradeoffs Why designers choose one memory type over another. Applications for each were clearly delineate... » read more

New Challenges For Data Centers

By Ed Sperling - 08 May, 2019 - Comments: 0

Rita Horner, senior technical marketing manager in Synopsys’ Solutions Group, looks at the impact of a significant rise in data, why this often leads to big cost increases, and where the bottlenecks are occurring. » read more

2.5D, 3D Power Integrity

By Ed Sperling - 14 Mar, 2019 - Comments: 0

Chris Ortiz, principal applications engineer at ANSYS, zeroes in on some common issues that are showing up in 2.5D and 3D packaging, which were not obvious in the initial implementations of these packaging technologies. This includes everything from how to build a power delivery network to minimize the coupling between chips to dealing with variability and power integrity and placement of diffe... » read more

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