The topic of chiplets is getting a lot of attention these days. The chiplet movement has picked up more momentum since Moore’s law started slowing down as process technology approached 5nm. With the development cost of a monolithic SoC crossing the $500M and wafer yields of large die-based chips dropping steeply, the decision … Read More


Connecting Everything, Everywhere, All at Once
The automotive industry is rapidly coming to the realization that connecting cars is about so much more than simply adding a modem, an antenna, and a bit of software. Connecting cars and connecting car owners with an attractive connectivity value proposition may be two of the most difficult things the industry has ever attempted.… Read More
Podcast EP82: The Critical Need for Reliability in Future Products
Dan is joined by Charlie Slayman, technical leader at Cisco Systems working on reliability physics and risk assessment of advanced semiconductor technology. He is also the general chair of the International Reliability Physics Symposium, or IRPS which is the focus of the discussion.
Dan explores the rapidly growing application… Read More
The New Normal for Semiconductor Manufacturing
One of the recent live events I attended was the 2022 GSA Silicon Leadership Summit on May 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center (my favorite location). This was the first GSA live event in two years so it was a must attend gathering. This event targets semiconductor ecosystem executives (200+ people attended) so there were many… Read More
Methods for Current Density and Point-to-point Resistance Calculations
IC reliability is an issue that circuit design engineers and reliability engineers are concerned about, because physical effects like high Current Density (CD) in interconnect layers, or high point-to-point (P2P) resistance on device interconnect can impact reliability, timing or Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) robustness.… Read More
Very Short Reach (VSR) Connectivity for Optical Modules
Bandwidth, latency, power and reach are always the key points of focus when it comes to connectivity. As the demand for more data and higher bandwidth connectivity continue, power management is gaining a lot of attention. There is renewed interest in pursuing silicon photonics to address many of these challenges. There are many… Read More
[WEBINAR] Secure your devices with PUF plus hardware root-of-trust
It’s a hostile world we live in, and cybersecurity of connected devices is a big concern. Attacks are rising rapidly, and vulnerabilities get exploited immediately. Supply chains are complex. Regulations are proliferating. Secrets don’t stay secrets for long – in fact, the only secret in a system with open-source algorithms… Read More
Refined Fault Localization through Learning. Innovation in Verification
This is another look at refining the accuracy of fault localization. Once a bug has been detected, such techniques aim to pin down the most likely code locations for a root cause. Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Raúl Camposano (Silicon Catalyst, entrepreneur, former Synopsys CTO and now Silvaco CTO) and I continue… Read More
3D IC Update from User2User
Our smart phones, tablets, laptops and desktops are the most common consumer products with advanced 2.5D and 3D IC packaging techniques. I love seeing the product tear down articles to learn how advanced packaging techniques are being used, so at the User2User conference in Santa Clara I attended a presentation from Tarek Ramadan,… Read More
Sensing – Who needs it?
In a simple answer – everyone. A keynote presentation “Sensing the Unknowns and Managing Power” by Mahesh Tirupattur, the Executive Vice President at Analog Bits at the recent Siemens User2User conference, discussed the need and application of sensors in computing and power applications. Why sense? As Mahesh explains, sensing… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment