The move to true 3D IC, monolithic 3D SOC and 3D heterogeneous integration may require one of the most major design tool architecture overhauls since IC design tools were first developed. While we have been taking steps toward 3DIC with 2.5D designs with interposers, HBM, etc., the fundamental tools and flows remain intact in many… Read More
On November 13, Cadence held its annual Photonics Summit. Cadence has been hosting this event for several years with the intention of advancing the photonics industry. With this event, Cadence has been a catalyst in furthering photonic product development. It’s quite remarkable that Cadence hosts such an event in a field where… Read More
Innovations in packaging have played an important role in improving system performance and area utilization. Advances like 2.5D interposers and fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) have allowed mixed dies to be used in a single package and have dramatically reduced the number of connections that need to go all the way to the… Read More
The semiconductor industry has built decades of success on hyper-integration to increase functionality and performance while also reducing system cost. But the standard way to do this, to jam more and more functionality onto a single die, breaks down when some of the functions you want to integrate are built in different processes.… Read More
Dual in-line memory modules (DIMM’s ) with double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM) have been around since before we were worried about Y2K. Over the intervening years this format for provisioning memory has evolved from supporting DDR around 1995, to DDR1 in 2000, DDR2 in 2003, DDR4 in 2007 and DDR4… Read More
The first transistor was made of two electrodes, held in place by plastic, making contact with a piece of doped germanium. Ever since then, devices and their packaging have been performing a complicated and oftentimes intricate dance. Single transistor devices became integrated circuits, and along the way separate IC’s were… Read More
Once a year, during the TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Forum you can expect to see cutting edge technical achievements by TSMC and their partners. This year was no exception, with Open-Silicon presenting its accomplishments in implementing an HBM reference design in 16nm. It’s well understood that HBM offers huge benefits… Read More
A significant shift is underway in the fabless semiconductor business model. As the application markets have become more diverse (and more cost-sensitive), product requirements have necessitated a new focus on multi-die packaging technology. … Read More
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) promises to do for electronic product design what high-rise buildings did for cities. Up until now, electronic circuits have suffered from the equivalent of suburban sprawl. HBM is a radical transformation of memory architecture that will have huge ripple effects on how SOC based electronics are … Read More
The use of silicon interposers is growing. Several years ago Xilinx broke new ground by employing interposers in their Virtex®-7 H580T FPGA. Last August Samsung announced what they say is the first DDR4 module to use 3D TSV’s for enterprise servers. Their 64GB double data rate-4 modules will be used for high end computing where … Read More
