New Approaches To Power Decoupling

By Bryon Moyer - 24 Oct, 2024 - Comments: 0

Decoupling capacitors have long been an important aspect of maintaining a clean power source for integrated circuits, but with noise caused by rising clock frequencies, multiple power domains, and various types of advanced packaging, new approaches are needed. Power is a much more important factor than it used to be, especially in the era of AI. “Doing an AI search consumes 10X the power t... » read more

Striking A Balance On Efficiency, Performance, And Cost

By Ed Sperling - 11 Sep, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss power-related issues such as voltage droop, application-specific processing elements, the impact of physical effects in advanced packaging, and the benefits of backside power delivery, with Hans Yeager, senior principal engineer, architecture, at Tenstorrent; Joe Davis, senior director for Calibre interfaces and EM/IR product m... » read more

Voltage Drop Now Requires Dynamic Analysis

By Karen Heyman - 08 Aug, 2024 - Comments: 0

At one time a relatively infrequent occurrence, voltage drop is now a major impediment to reliability at advanced nodes. Decades ago, voltage drop was only an issue for very large and high-speed designs, where there was concern about supply lines delivering full voltage to transistors. As design margins have tightened in modern advanced designs, controlling voltage drop has become a requiremen... » read more

Droop And Silent Data Corruption

By Aakash Jani - 25 Jul, 2024 - Comments: 0

By Aakash Jani and Lee Vick Let me set the scene. You are a child psychologist (played by, let’s say, Bruce Willis for illustrative purposes), and you are sitting next to a frightened kid. He turns to you and whispers, “I see dead bits.” Okay, I grant you that’s not exactly the quote, but data center operators are seeing transient errors at an alarming rate, and at scale. These error... » read more

Remote Droop Detection And Response Use Case

By Movellus - 28 Feb, 2024 - Comments: 0

While sea of processor architectures feature a stamp and repeat design, per-core workloads aren't always symmetrically balanced. For example, a cloud provider (AI or compute) will rent out individual core clusters to customers for specialized and varied workloads. However, this asymmetry, combined with rapid provisioning changes, can lead to global voltage droops on the SoC resulting in potenti... » read more

Which Data Works Best For Voltage Droop Simulation

By Ann Mutschler - 15 Jan, 2024 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the need for the right type of data, why this has to be done early in the design flow, and how 3D-IC will affect all of this, with Bill Mullen, distinguished engineer at Ansys; Rajat Chaudhry, product management group director at Cadence; Heidi Barnes, senior applications engineer at Keysight; Venkatesh Santhanagopalan, prod... » read more

Analog Design Complicates Voltage Droop

By Ann Mutschler - 27 Dec, 2023 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about voltage droop in analog and mixed-signal designs, and the need for multi-vendor tool interoperability and more precision, with Bill Mullen, distinguished engineer at Ansys; Rajat Chaudhry, product management group director at Cadence; Heidi Barnes, senior applications engineer at Keysight; Venkatesh Santhanagopalan, product ... » read more

Managing P/P Tradeoffs With Voltage Droop Gets Trickier

By Ann Mutschler - 14 Sep, 2023 - Comments: 0

Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about voltage droop/IR drop with Bill Mullen, distinguished engineer at Ansys; Rajat Chaudhry, product management group director at Cadence; Heidi Barnes, senior applications engineer at Keysight Technologies; Venkatesh Santhanagopalan, product manager at Movellus; Joe Davis, senior director for Calibre interfaces and mPower EM/IR... » read more

Balancing IR Drop Unpredictability With Post-Silicon Flexibility

By Aakash Jani - 24 Aug, 2023 - Comments: 0

The concept of IR drop in silicon chips has always been a crucial aspect of chip design. However, recent technological trends and the emergence of new challenges, such as voltage-sensitive paths, have introduced a degree of uncertainty in predicting and effectively managing IR drop. These uncertainties are driving the need for a more flexible approach in mitigating on-die voltage droop. Increa... » read more

Mitigating Voltage Droop

By Aakash Jani - 13 Jun, 2023 - Comments: 0

Voltage droop, also known as IR drop, is a phenomenon that occurs when the current in the power delivery network abruptly changes due to workload fluctuations. This can lead to supply voltage drops across system-on-chips (SoCs) which can cause severe performance degradation, limit their energy efficiency, and in extreme cases can cause catastrophic timing failures. To avoid these issues, conven... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

NAND Flash Targets 1,000 Layers

New techniques go beyond improved deposition and etching, but challenges stack up, too.

by Bryon Moyer

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.