EDA updates on ECO, DFT; Samsung’s roadmap; Intel Innovation; new fabs; EU common charger

Plenty of news from the whole ICT-semiconductor ecosystem this week, some of them with a common underlying theme: the advent of chiplet-based 3D devices. Let’s start with some EDA updates.

Synopsys’ ‘streaming fabric’ for silicon lifecycle management

Synopsys has announced a streaming fabric technology aimed to shorten both silicon data access and test time – by up to 80%, according to the company – while also minimizing excessive power. Generated by Synopsys TestMAX DFT tool and part of Synopsys’ silicon lifecycle management flow, the new streaming fabric is an on-chip network that transports silicon data to and from multiple design blocks and multi-die systems. According to Synopsys, the fabric calls for minimal planning effort and has a limited physical impact on design. Additionally, a new power estimation technology incorporated in Synopsys TestMAX ATPG solution more accurately determines power drawn at data application time.

Synopsys’ new ECO solution

Synopsys has also announced PrimeClosure, a golden signoff ECO (engineering change order) solution that addresses lengthy engineering design closure times. According to the company, early customers have achieved up to 45% better timing, up to 10% better power, up to 50% fewer ECO iterations and up to 10x higher design productivity compared to traditional ECO flows. PrimeClosure has direct access to incrementally enabled placement, routing, extraction, physical verification, equivalence checking and signoff technologies from the other Synopsys tools, and is integrated with Ansys RedHawk-SC digital power integrity signoff solution, enabling to account for and fix up to 50% of late-stage dynamic voltage drop violations and maximize energy efficiency without impacting chip timing.

Siemens’ DFT solution for 2.5D and 3D architectures

Siemens EDA has introduced the Tessent Multi-die software solution, which aims to speed and simplify design-for-test tasks for integrated circuits based on 2.5D and 3D architectures. These devices can present significant challenges for IC test, since most legacy IC test solutions are targeted to conventional two-dimensional processes. Tessent Multi-die software is integrated with Tessent TestKompress Streaming Scan Network software and Tessent IJTAG software. According to Siemens, Tessent Multi-die software enables IC design teams to rapidly generate IEEE 1838 compliant hardware featuring 2.5D and 3D IC architectures. The solution can also generate die-to-die interconnect patterns and enable package level test using the Boundary Scan Description Language (BSDL).

Samsung foundry’s roadmap to 1.4nm and tripled capacity

Samsung will be further enhancing its gate-all-around (GAA) based technology, and plans to introduce the 2-nanometer process in 2025 followed by the 1.4-nanometer process in 2027. The South Korean foundry plans to expand its production capacity for the advanced nodes by more than three times by 2027 compared to this year. Samsung has also announced that its 3D packaging X-Cube technology with micro-bump interconnection will be ready for mass production in 2024, and the bump-less X-Cube will be available in 2026.

Intel Innovation event

Here is a quick summary of some of the news from the recent Intel Innovation event. The new Intel Geti computer vision platform (formerly Sonoma Creek) promises to make it easy for anyone in the enterprise — from data scientists to domain experts — to quickly develop effective AI models. Leaders from Samsung and TSMC joined Intel to voice support for the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) consortium. Intel previewed a pluggable co-package photonics solution for lower cost optical chip-to-chip connections, based on a pluggable connector. Intel Foundry Services, through its Innovation Fund, has provided funding to Astera, Movellus and SiFive. The open oneAPI specification will now be managed by Codeplay, an Intel subsidiary. Other recent Intel news concern Mobileye, that has filed a registration statement for a proposed Initial Public Offering. The company intends to list its common stock on Nasdaq.

New fabs: Intel, Micron, STMicroelectronics, Atom Computing

According to a Reuters exclusive report, Intel has picked the town of Vigasio in northeastern Italy as its preferred site for a 4.5 billion euros semiconductor packaging and assembly plant.

U.S memory maker Micron Technology is reportedly planning to invest $100 billion over the next twenty years to build a fab in Clay, New York.

STMicroelectronics will build an integrated Silicon Carbide substrate manufacturing facility at its Catania site in Italy – alongside the existing SiC device fab.

Atom Computing, a Berkeley, California-based quantum computer maker, has reportedly said it would invest $100 million over the next three years in Colorado where it plans to build its next generation of quantum computers.

Facebook’s AI inference systems targets both Nvidia and AMD GPUs

Meta AI (Facebook) has developed and is open-sourcing AITemplate (AIT), a unified inference system with separate acceleration back ends for both AMD and Nvidia GPU hardware. Currently, GPU inference solution are concentrated in platform-specific and closed black box runtimes, therefore a machine learning system designed for one vendor’s GPU must be completely reimplemented in order to work on a different vendor’s hardware. According to Meta, AIT delivers close to hardware-native Tensor Core (Nvidia GPU) and Matrix Core (AMD GPU) performance on a variety of widely used AI models. Meta claims to have used AIT to achieve performance improvements up to 12x on Nvidia GPUs and 4x on AMD GPUs compared with eager mode within PyTorch.

European Union Parliament passes the ‘common charger’ law

By the end of 2024, all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the European Union will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C charging port. From spring 2026, the obligation will extend to laptops. The law approved by the EU Parliament applies to all products that are rechargeable via a wired cable, operating with a power delivery of up to 100 Watts – including headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds. These new obligations will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases, and will reduce e-waste.

‘Matter’ IoT standard released

The Connectivity Standards Alliance has released the Matter 1.0 specification and opened the Matter certification program, to ensure interoperability across IoT products. Matter’s underlying network technologies are Wi-Fi and Thread. Wi-Fi enables devices to interact over a high-bandwidth local network and allows smart home devices to communicate with the cloud, while Thread provides an energy efficient and reliable mesh network within the home.

An open-source dataset for machine learning applications in EDA

A team of Chinese researchers has come up with an open-source dataset for machine learning applications in EDA. According to the authors, although building ML models usually requires a large amount of data, most studies concerning EDA can only generate small internal datasets for validation because of the lack of large public datasets. Called CircuitNet, the proposed dataset supports cross-stage prediction tasks in back-end design. Data collection used Risc-V designs and obtained over 10,000 layouts. The user guide and the download link for CircuitNet can be accessed from https://circuitnet.github.io.

Vietnam’s FPT enters the semiconductor market

Vietnam’s ICT company FPT Software has launched a new subsidiary, FPT Semiconductor – a fabless business – planning to supply 25 million chips globally by 2023. FPT Semiconductor released its first integrated circuits, which were designed in Vietnam and manufactured in South Korea, in August 2022. These ICs will be used in IoT medical devices. FPT Software is part of FPT Corporation, an ICT service provider headquartered in Vietnam, with nearly US$1.6 billion in revenue and 54,000 employees in 28 countries.

Acquisitions

Bosch plans acquisition of Dutch radiofrequency specialist ItoM to strengthen its expertise for high-frequency processing SoCs targeting automotive applications. Founded by former Philips engineers, ItoM employs thirty people and is specialized in high-frequency processing components and mixed-signal IC design.

Reading suggestions

Lastly, some reading suggestions. IEEE Spectrum magazine has collected the opinions of several robotic experts about the Tesla robot. AI startup Tachyum has authored a white paper describing its Prodigy architecture. Canadian reverse engineering firm TechInsights has produced an e-book on smartphone’s fast charging algorithms, and a Q&A document on the future of GaN.

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