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

Changing The Design Flow


Synopsys’ Michael Jackson talks with Semiconductor Engineering about why it’s becoming necessary to fuse together various pieces of digital design. https://youtu.be/AOWh4wjw-ps » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 31


Training optical neural networks Researchers from Stanford University used an optical chip to train an artificial neural network, a step that could lead to faster, more efficient AI tasks. Although optical neural networks have been recently demonstrated, the training step was performed using a model on a traditional digital computer and the final settings were then imported into the optical... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: July 16


Bacterial solar Researchers at the University of British Columbia developed a solar cell that uses bacteria to convert light to energy. The cell worked as efficiently in dim light as in bright light, making solar a potential option in areas of the world that frequently have overcast skies. Called biogenic cells, they work by utilizing the natural dye that bacteria use for photosynthesis. Pr... » read more

Thermal Issues And Modern SoCs: How Hot Is Hot?


A Q&A with Moortec CTO Oliver King. What are the thermal issues of modern SoCs? Gate density has been increasing with each node and that pushes up power per unit area, and I think that has become an even bigger issue with FinFET processes where the channels are more thermally isolated than the planar processes before them. In the last few planar nodes, leakage was an issue which led ... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 21


Mentor's Colin Walls posits that one part of the reason modern code has so many bugs may be the way we talk about them, and it's time for a change in terminology. Following up on a post about the challenges of bringing digital literacy to an area where many are unable to read, Cadence's Madhavi Rao looks at the impact agriculture-focused IoT technologies could have on rural areas in India. ... » read more

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