HotChips 2023 was held August 27-29, 2023 at Stanford University in California and was the first in-person version of the conference in 4 years. The conference was held in a hybrid format that had over 500…Read More
Balancing IR Drop Unpredictability With Post-Silicon Flexibility
The concept of IR drop in silicon chips has always been a crucial aspect of chip design. However, recent technological trends and the emergence of new challenges, such as voltage-sensitive paths, have introduced a degree…Read More
Managing Voltage Variation
Engineers make many tradeoffs when designing SoC’s to better meet design specifications. Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are the primary goals and all three impact the cost of the implementation. For example, higher power and…Read More
Supercomputing Efficiency Lags Performance Gains
In last month’s article, Top 500: Frontier is Still on Top, I wrote about the latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists. Power is an incredibly important aspect of designing a world performance leading supercomputer. (Why, I can remember…Read More
Mitigating Voltage Droop
Voltage droop, also known as IR drop, is a phenomenon that occurs when the current in the power delivery network abruptly changes due to workload fluctuations. This can lead to supply voltage drops across system-on-chips…Read More
Top500: Frontier Is Still On Top
The latest versions of the Top500 and Green500 lists were just released on May 22, 2023. The last time that I wrote about the Green500, a Chinese machine, NRCPC’s Sunway TaihuLight, was sitting at the top of the Top500 list….Read More
TSMC Targets N2 Production For 2025
April ended with TSMC’s financial results for the 1st Quarter of 2023 reported on April 20, 2023, and their North American Technology Symposium was held on April 27 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. TSMC’s N3 entered volume production…Read More
Squeezing The Margins
Back in 2016, we looked at the MediaTek Helio X20, the first Tri-Gear mobile SoC. Tri-Gear is a step beyond ARM’s big.LITTLE concept of using two different cores that have unique power and performance characteristics, by…Read More