One of the best ways to speed-up product development is to integrate test as early as possible in the design cycle. This shift-left strategy becomes even more critical when advanced IC designs evolve from a single die per package to complex systems with multiple dies integrated into a package. These 2.5D and 3D multi-die design strategies pose some interesting challenges and opportunities for test. Today, David Lyell interviews Joe Reynick, the Tessent Product Engineering Manager for Siemens...

3D IC designs are complex puzzles that engineers have to solve to achieve high performance and reliability. While vertical stacking gives more design options, it also increases the possible number of defective arrangements. There is no one-design-fits-all in 3D IC; engineers must understand their needs and create designs that meet them. Today, John McMillan interviews John Ferguson, Product Management Director of Calibre DRC Technologies at Siemens Digital EDA. He’ll help us understand the...

A common challenge faced when actualizing new technologies such as 3D IC is the lack of specialized tools to mass assemble them. That’s because their designs are normally developed by R&D teams that view commercialization as someone else’s task. At the moment, organizations are working to create and perfect the tools need to assemble 3D IC chips. Today, John McMillan interviews John Ferguson, Director of Product Management, Dusan Petranovic, Principal Technologist, and Steve McKinney,...

One of the challenges of designing 3D IC chips is getting data from different sources in different formats to work together. You also need a solution that allows you to verify different components such as the interposer, the package, and the die together. Siemens solution allows you to combine data from different sources and handle the verification process collectively. Today,  John McMillan interviews Mike Walsh, Technical Applications Engineering Director of the Technical Solutions Sales...

For 3D IC to achieve its full potential there is a need to utilize cost-effective front-end design approaches. This is because different microarchitectures will result in different physical sizes, power performance, and cost of production. One of the solutions that have been successfully deployed is the high-level predictive analysis which helps in figuring out optimal architectures for specific cases. In this episode, John McMillan interviews Anthony Mastroianni, the 3D IC Solutions...

In most cases, it’s very expensive to get game-changing technological advancements in electrical components to the market. This is because they also require the advancement of the existing design workflows and tools. This barrier has slowed down and even completely stopped the possible mass production of many revolutionary devices. 3D IC is not exempt from this challenge - that’s why several large companies have invested heavily in the development of new package design flows and tools to...

Standardization plays an important role in promoting the mass adoption of new electrical components. For instance, Application-Specific Standard products, known as ASSP components have been broadly adopted by system designers for board-level integration. These devices have standardized models to enable the PCB level, system design ecosystem. Chiplets are an analogous component that can be integrated at the package level. That’s why the 3D IC design community will likely advocate for...

Electronic circuits design has become more complex due to the consumers’ need for more features that require more processing capability. To keep up with these demands, new methodologies of designing and connecting chips have been developed. The latest innovation in this area is the three-dimensional integrated circuits (3D IC), which take less space and deliver much higher performance compared to traditional monolithic technologies. In this episode, John McMillan interviews Anthony...