Finding Hotspots In AI Chips


Things are getting far more complicated as we move down to 7nm & 5nm but the tolerances of some of the physical effects that we have been measuring in the past are much tighter than they were at the older nodes. How do we track all that? What we see is that as we descend through the advanced nodes, say from 16nm down to 12nm, 7nm and more recently 5nm, we see that gate density starts to ... » read more

Thermal Challenges And Moore’s Law


Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, looks at the evolution of graphics cards over a couple of decades and how designs changed to deal with more graphics and more heat, and why smaller, faster and cheaper doesn’t apply in this market. » read more

Monitoring Heat On AI Chips


Stephen Crosher, CEO of Moortec, talks about monitoring temperature differences on-chip in AI chips and how to make the most of the power that can be delivered to a device and why accuracy is so critical. » read more

Less Margin, More Respins, And New Markets


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of multi-physics and new market applications on chip design with John Lee, general manager and vice president of ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; Duane Boning, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and Thomas Harms, director EDA/IP Alliance at Infineon. What foll... » read more

Another Brick Or Two In The Chip Design Wall


Physical challenges come and go in the semiconductor world. But increasingly, they also stick around, showing up in inconvenient places at the worst time. The chip industry has confronted and solved some massive challenges over the years. There was the 1 micron lithography wall, which was supposed to be impenetrable. That was followed by the 193nm litho challenge, which cost many billions of... » read more

3D Power Delivery


Getting power into and around a chip is becoming a lot more difficult due to increasing power density, but 2.5D and 3D integration are pushing those problems to whole new levels. The problems may even be worse with new packaging approaches, such as chiplets, because they constrain how problems can be analyzed and solved. Add to that list issues around new fabrication technologies and an emph... » read more

Using Compression For High-Bandwidth Video


Malte Doerper, senior manager for product management at Synopsys, explains how to improve bandwidth and reduce latency in video without changing out the existing infrastructure through compression, but unlike previous versions of compression there is no significant loss of quality. This approach reduces power, area and heat, as well. » read more

Speeding Up Electrical Vehicle Development With Designer-Centric Thermal And Electromagnetic Simulation And Analysis


By 2040, 54% of new car sales and 33% of the global car fleet is predicted to be electric [1]. More than six countries have announced a ban on internal-combustion engines. China is expected to be the largest market for electrical vehicles (EVs), which is driving automakers to make aggressive rollout plans for EVs. Some of the important trends driving EV development are getting more than 200 ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 25


Heat transfer in 2D materials Engineers at the University of Illinois developed a way to reduce overheating in nanoelectronics that incorporate 2D components by adding another layer to the structure. "In the field of nanoelectronics, the poor heat dissipation of 2D materials has been a bottleneck to fully realizing their potential in enabling the manufacture of ever-smaller electronics whil... » read more

Getting Ahead With Early Power Analysis


Today’s mobile applications need to cater to a broad set of applications. They can be communications-heavy (Bluetooth and GPS), graphics-intensive (streaming 4K videos), or compute-intensive workloads (AR/VR gaming). At the heart of this processing lies the all-powerful mobile processor, which includes a multi-core CPU, GPU, memory and other IP and subsystems for performing a variety of ta... » read more

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