As the industry begins production at 45-nm geometries, one of the issues that needs to be resolved is that of planarity—the flatness of the IC after chemical-mechanical planarization. At 45nm and below, fill solutions become much more challenging, because manufacturing processes and physical interactions become more sensitive to small metal density variations.

A big part of the problem is that the allowable thickness variation has remained constant at +/-15%, even while the total thickness of wires has decreased. This dichotomy means that the percentage of total … Read More → "Fill Solutions Are Getting Smarter"

The whole way through creating your SoC you are faced with decisions. Some of the hardest decisions, since they are the most difficult to change if they are later seen as sub-optimal, are those made at the architectural level. How do you assign the tasks that you need in order to produce the performance you want, at a reasonable cost in IP licences, silicon real estate, power consumption, and end product performance? For this part of the application, we really require the number crunching of a DSP, while over here we want the flexibility of running an OS, say … Read More → "Decisions, Decisions, and Threads"

Wolfgang froze when he saw it. He had heard rumors that such things might be possible, that his job could one day be at risk, but he had more or less blown it off. Too many other things to worry about. And then… there it was. An automatic translation facility on the web.

He made his living painstakingly translating documents to and from German. He had always been convinced that computers could never do what humans did. But now he wasn’t so sure. Computers had completely trashed other careers that used … Read More → "Not For Software Engineers"

Standards are a tricky business. They require cooperation between competitors to be successful. They require companies with well-entrenched proprietary positions at the feeding trough to yield some of that advantage so that others may feed alongside them. There has to be an overarching good that can be achieved – especially for the companies having to cede pole position. “Kum-bah-yah” and “this is good for the universe and your karma” won’t get very far. Even if there’s a really really good reason, PEGS LAW* will conspire to upset the best standardization effort. … Read More → "IP Interface Standards"