Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology proposed a new EUV litho technology using only four reflective mirrors and a new method of illumination optics that it claims will use 1/10 the power and cost half as much as existing EUV technology from ASML.

Applied Materials may not receive expected U.S. funding to build a $4 billion research facility in Sunnyvale, CA, due to internal government disagreements over how to fund chip R&D, according to Bloomberg.

SEMI published a position paper this week cautioning the European Union against imposing additional export controls to allow companies, encouraging them to  be “as free as possible in their investment decisions to avoid losing their agility and relevance across global markets.” SEMI’s recommendations on outbound investments are in response to the European Economic Security Strategy and emphasize the need for a transparent and predictable regulatory framework.

The U.S. may restrict China’s access to HBM chips and the equipment needed to make them, reports Bloomberg. Today those chips are manufactured by two Korean-based companies, Samsung and SK hynix, but U.S.-based Micron expects to begin shipping 12-high stacks of HBM3E in 2025, and is currently working on HBM4.

Synopsys executive chair and founder Dr. Aart de Geus was named the winner of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s Robert N. Noyce Award. De Geus was selected due to his contributions to EDA technology over a career spanning more than four decades.

The top three foundries plan to implement high-NA EUV lithography as early as 2025 for the 18 angstrom generation, but the replacement of single exposure high-NA (0.55) over double patterning with standard EUV (NA = 0.33) depends on whether it provides better results at a reasonable cost per wafer.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Market Reports and Earnings
Education and Training
Security
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Belgium-based Imec released part 2 of its chiplets series, addressing testing strategies and standardization efforts, as well as guidelines and research “towards efficient ESD protection strategies for advanced 3D systems-on-chip.”

Also in Belgium, BelGan, maker of GaN chips, filed for bankruptcy according to the Brussels Times.

TSMC‘s Dresden, Germany, plant will break ground this month.

The UK will dole out more than £100 million (~US $128 million) in funding to develop five new quantum research hubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford, and London.

MassPhoton is opening Hong Kong‘s first ultra-high vacuum GaN epitaxial wafer pilot line and will establish a GaN research center.

Infineon completed the sale of its manufacturing sites in the Philippines and South Korea to ASE.

Israel-based RAAAM Memory Technologies received a €5.25 million grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) to support the development and commercialization of its innovative memory solutions. This funding will enable RAAAM to advance its research in high-performance and energy-efficient memory technologies, accelerating their integration into various applications and markets.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these top stories and video:

• Chip Security Now Depends On Widening Supply Chain
• Defining Chip Threat Models To Determining Security Risks
• Post-Quantum Computing Threatens Fundamental Transport Protocols

And:

• Where Power Savings Really Count
• Making Electronics More Efficient (video)

Market Reports and Earnings

The semiconductor equipment industry is on a positive trajectory in 2024, with moderate revenue growth observed in Q2 after a subdued Q1, according to a new report from Yole Group. Wafer Fab Equipment revenue is projected to grow by 1.3% year-on-year, despite a 12% drop in Q1. Test equipment lead times are normalizing, improving order conditions. Key areas driving growth include memory and logic capital expenditures and high-bandwidth memory demand.

Worldwide silicon wafer shipments increased by 7% in Q2 2024, according to SEMI‘s latest report. This growth is attributed to robust demand from multiple semiconductor sectors, driven by advancements in AI, 5G, and automotive technologies.

The RF GaN market is projected to grow to US $2 billion by 2029, a 10% CAGR, according to Yole Group.

Counterpoint released their Q2 smartphone top 10 report.

Renesas completed their acquisition of EDA firm Altium, best known for its EDA platform and freeware CircuitMaker package.

It’s earnings season and here are recently released financials in the chip industry:

AMD  Advantest   Amkor   Ansys  Arteris   Arm   ASE   ASM   ASML
Cadence  IBM   Intel   Lam Research   Lattice   Nordson   NXP   Onsemi 
Qualcomm   Rambus  Samsung    SK Hynix   STMicro   Teradyne    TI  
Tower  TSMC    UMC  Western Digital

Industry stock price impacts are here.

Education and Training

Rochester Institute of Technology is leading a new pilot program to prepare community college students in areas such as cleanroom operations, new materials, simulation, and testing processes, with the intent of eventual transfer into RIT’s microelectronic engineering program.

Purdue University inked a deal with three research institutions — University of Piraeus, Technical University of Crete, and King’s College London —to develop joint research programs for semiconductors, AI and other critical technology fields.

The European Chips Skills Academy formed the Educational Leaders Board to help bridge the talent gap in Europe’s microelectronics sector.  The Board includes representatives from universities, vocational training providers, educators and research institutions who collaborate on strategic initiatives to strengthen university networks and build academic expertise through ECSA training programs.

Security

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is encouraging Apple users to review and apply this week’s recent security updates.

Microsoft Azure experienced a nearly 10 hour DDoS attack this week, leading to global service disruption for many customers.  “While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which activated our DDoS protection mechanisms, initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” stated Microsoft in a release.

NIST published:

• “Recommendations For Increasing U.S. Participation and Leadership in Standards Development,” a report outlining cybersecurity recommendations and mitigation strategies.
• Final guidance documents and software to help improve the “safety, security and trustworthiness of AI systems.”
• Cloud Computing Forensic Reference Architecture guide.

Delta Air Lines plans to seek damages after losing $500 million in lost revenue due to security company CrowdStrike‘s software update debacle.  And shareholders are also angry.

Recent security research:

• Physically Secure Logic Locking With Nanomagnet Logic (UT Dallas)
• WBP: Training-time Backdoor Attacks through HW-based Weight Bit Poisoning (UCF)
• S-Tune: SOT-MTJ Manufacturing Parameters Tuning for Secure Next Generation of Computing ( U. of Arizona, UCF)
• Diffie Hellman Picture Show: Key Exchange Stories from Commercial VoWiFi Deployments (CISPA, SBA Research, U. of Vienna)

Product News

Lam Research introduced a new version of its cryogenic etch technology designed to enhance the manufacturing of 3D NAND for AI applications. This technology allows for the precise etching of high aspect ratio features, crucial for creating 1,000-layer 3D NAND.

Fig.1: 3D NAND etch. Source: Lam Research

Alphawave Semi launched its Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Die-to-Die IP. The subsystem offers 8 Tbps/mm bandwidth density and supports operation at 24 Gbps for D2D connectivity.

Infineon introduced a new MCU series for industrial and consumer motor controls, as well as power conversion system applications. The company also unveiled its new GoolGaN Drive product family of integrated single switches and half-bridges with integrated drivers.

Rambus released its DDR5 Client Clock Driver for next-gen, high-performance desktops and notebooks. The chips include Gen1 to Gen4 RCDs, power management ICs, Serial Presence Detect Hubs, and temperature sensors for leading-edge servers.

SK hynix introduced its new GDDR7 graphics DRAM. The product has an operating speed of 32Gbps, can process 1.5TB of data per second and has a 50% power efficiency improvement compared to the previous generation.

Intel launched its new Lunar Lake Ultra processors. The long awaited chips will be included in more than 80 laptop designs and has more than 40 NPU tera operations per second as well as over 60 GPU TOPS delivering more than 100 platform TOPS.

Brewer Science achieved recertification as a Certified B Corporation, reaffirming its commitment to sustainable and ethical business practices.

Panasonic adopted Siemens’ Teamcenter X cloud product lifecycle management solution, citing Teamcenter X’s Mendix low-code platform, improved operational efficiency and flexibility for its choice.

Keysight validated its 5G NR FR1 1024-QAM demodulation test cases for the first time. The 5G NR radio access technology supports eMBB and was validated on the 3GPP TS 38.521-4 test specification.

Research

In a 47-page deep-dive report, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology delved into all of the scientific breakthroughs from 1980 to present that brought EUV lithography to commercialization, including lessons learned for the next emerging technologies.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute developed a high-performance X-ray tomography technique using burst ptychography, achieving a resolution of 4nm. This method allows for non-destructive imaging of integrated circuits, providing detailed views of nanostructures in materials like silicon and metals.

MIT signed a four-year agreement with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme at University of Copenhagen, focused on accelerating quantum computing hardware research.

MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) developed a mechanically flexible wafer-scale integrated photonics fabrication platform. This enables the creation of flexible photonic circuits that maintain high performance while being bendable and stretchable. It offers significant potential for integrating photonic circuits into various flexible substrate applications in wearable technology, medical devices, and flexible electronics.

The Naval Research Lab identified a new class of semiconductor nanocrystals with bright ground-state excitons, emphasizing an important advancement in optoelectronics.

Researchers from National University of Singapore developed a novel method, known as tension-driven CHARM3D,  to fabricate 3D self-healing circuits, enabling the 3D printing of free-standing metallic structures without the need for support materials and external pressure.

Find more research in our Technical Papers library.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as quantum safe cryptography, analytics for high-volume manufacturing, and mastering EMC simulations for electronic design.

Find Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters here:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

The post Chip Industry Week in Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology proposed a new EUV litho technology using only four reflective mirrors and a new method of illumination optics that it claims will use 1/10 the power and cost half as much as existing EUV technology from ASML.

Applied Materials may not receive expected U.S. funding to build a $4 billion research facility in Sunnyvale, CA, due to internal government disagreements over how to fund chip R&D, according to Bloomberg.

SEMI published a position paper this week cautioning the European Union against imposing additional export controls to allow companies, encouraging them to  be “as free as possible in their investment decisions to avoid losing their agility and relevance across global markets.” SEMI’s recommendations on outbound investments are in response to the European Economic Security Strategy and emphasize the need for a transparent and predictable regulatory framework.

The U.S. may restrict China’s access to HBM chips and the equipment needed to make them, reports Bloomberg. Today those chips are manufactured by two Korean-based companies, Samsung and SK hynix, but U.S.-based Micron expects to begin shipping 12-high stacks of HBM3E in 2025, and is currently working on HBM4.

Synopsys executive chair and founder Dr. Aart de Geus was named the winner of the Semiconductor Industry Association’s Robert N. Noyce Award. De Geus was selected due to his contributions to EDA technology over a career spanning more than four decades.

The top three foundries plan to implement high-NA EUV lithography as early as 2025 for the 18 angstrom generation, but the replacement of single exposure high-NA (0.55) over double patterning with standard EUV (NA = 0.33) depends on whether it provides better results at a reasonable cost per wafer.

Quick links to more news:

Global
In-Depth
Market Reports and Earnings
Education and Training
Security
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Belgium-based Imec released part 2 of its chiplets series, addressing testing strategies and standardization efforts, as well as guidelines and research “towards efficient ESD protection strategies for advanced 3D systems-on-chip.”

Also in Belgium, BelGan, maker of GaN chips, filed for bankruptcy according to the Brussels Times.

TSMC‘s Dresden, Germany, plant will break ground this month.

The UK will dole out more than £100 million (~US $128 million) in funding to develop five new quantum research hubs in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford, and London.

MassPhoton is opening Hong Kong‘s first ultra-high vacuum GaN epitaxial wafer pilot line and will establish a GaN research center.

Infineon completed the sale of its manufacturing sites in the Philippines and South Korea to ASE.

Israel-based RAAAM Memory Technologies received a €5.25 million grant from the European Innovation Council (EIC) to support the development and commercialization of its innovative memory solutions. This funding will enable RAAAM to advance its research in high-performance and energy-efficient memory technologies, accelerating their integration into various applications and markets.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these top stories and video:

• Chip Security Now Depends On Widening Supply Chain
• Defining Chip Threat Models To Determining Security Risks
• Post-Quantum Computing Threatens Fundamental Transport Protocols

And:

• Where Power Savings Really Count
• Making Electronics More Efficient (video)

Market Reports and Earnings

The semiconductor equipment industry is on a positive trajectory in 2024, with moderate revenue growth observed in Q2 after a subdued Q1, according to a new report from Yole Group. Wafer Fab Equipment revenue is projected to grow by 1.3% year-on-year, despite a 12% drop in Q1. Test equipment lead times are normalizing, improving order conditions. Key areas driving growth include memory and logic capital expenditures and high-bandwidth memory demand.

Worldwide silicon wafer shipments increased by 7% in Q2 2024, according to SEMI‘s latest report. This growth is attributed to robust demand from multiple semiconductor sectors, driven by advancements in AI, 5G, and automotive technologies.

The RF GaN market is projected to grow to US $2 billion by 2029, a 10% CAGR, according to Yole Group.

Counterpoint released their Q2 smartphone top 10 report.

Renesas completed their acquisition of EDA firm Altium, best known for its EDA platform and freeware CircuitMaker package.

It’s earnings season and here are recently released financials in the chip industry:

AMD  Advantest   Amkor   Ansys  Arteris   Arm   ASE   ASM   ASML
Cadence  IBM   Intel   Lam Research   Lattice   Nordson   NXP   Onsemi 
Qualcomm   Rambus  Samsung    SK Hynix   STMicro   Teradyne    TI  
Tower  TSMC    UMC  Western Digital

Industry stock price impacts are here.

Education and Training

Rochester Institute of Technology is leading a new pilot program to prepare community college students in areas such as cleanroom operations, new materials, simulation, and testing processes, with the intent of eventual transfer into RIT’s microelectronic engineering program.

Purdue University inked a deal with three research institutions — University of Piraeus, Technical University of Crete, and King’s College London —to develop joint research programs for semiconductors, AI and other critical technology fields.

The European Chips Skills Academy formed the Educational Leaders Board to help bridge the talent gap in Europe’s microelectronics sector.  The Board includes representatives from universities, vocational training providers, educators and research institutions who collaborate on strategic initiatives to strengthen university networks and build academic expertise through ECSA training programs.

Security

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is encouraging Apple users to review and apply this week’s recent security updates.

Microsoft Azure experienced a nearly 10 hour DDoS attack this week, leading to global service disruption for many customers.  “While the initial trigger event was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which activated our DDoS protection mechanisms, initial investigations suggest that an error in the implementation of our defenses amplified the impact of the attack rather than mitigating it,” stated Microsoft in a release.

NIST published:

• “Recommendations For Increasing U.S. Participation and Leadership in Standards Development,” a report outlining cybersecurity recommendations and mitigation strategies.
• Final guidance documents and software to help improve the “safety, security and trustworthiness of AI systems.”
• Cloud Computing Forensic Reference Architecture guide.

Delta Air Lines plans to seek damages after losing $500 million in lost revenue due to security company CrowdStrike‘s software update debacle.  And shareholders are also angry.

Recent security research:

• Physically Secure Logic Locking With Nanomagnet Logic (UT Dallas)
• WBP: Training-time Backdoor Attacks through HW-based Weight Bit Poisoning (UCF)
• S-Tune: SOT-MTJ Manufacturing Parameters Tuning for Secure Next Generation of Computing ( U. of Arizona, UCF)
• Diffie Hellman Picture Show: Key Exchange Stories from Commercial VoWiFi Deployments (CISPA, SBA Research, U. of Vienna)

Product News

Lam Research introduced a new version of its cryogenic etch technology designed to enhance the manufacturing of 3D NAND for AI applications. This technology allows for the precise etching of high aspect ratio features, crucial for creating 1,000-layer 3D NAND.

Fig.1: 3D NAND etch. Source: Lam Research

Alphawave Semi launched its Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express Die-toDie IP. The subsystem offers 8 Tbps/mm bandwidth density and supports operation at 24 Gbps for D2D connectivity.

Infineon introduced a new MCU series for industrial and consumer motor controls, as well as power conversion system applications. The company also unveiled its new GoolGaN Drive product family of integrated single switches and half-bridges with integrated drivers.

Rambus released its DDR5 Client Clock Driver for next-gen, high-performance desktops and notebooks. The chips include Gen1 to Gen4 RCDs, power management ICs, Serial Presence Detect Hubs, and temperature sensors for leading-edge servers.

SK hynix introduced its new GDDR7 graphics DRAM. The product has an operating speed of 32Gbps, can process 1.5TB of data per second and has a 50% power efficiency improvement compared to the previous generation.

Intel launched its new Lunar Lake Ultra processors. The long awaited chips will be included in more than 80 laptop designs and has more than 40 NPU tera operations per second as well as over 60 GPU TOPS delivering more than 100 platform TOPS.

Brewer Science achieved recertification as a Certified B Corporation, reaffirming its commitment to sustainable and ethical business practices.

Panasonic adopted Siemens’ Teamcenter X cloud product lifecycle management solution, citing Teamcenter X’s Mendix low-code platform, improved operational efficiency and flexibility for its choice.

Keysight validated its 5G NR FR1 1024-QAM demodulation test cases for the first time. The 5G NR radio access technology supports eMBB and was validated on the 3GPP TS 38.521-4 test specification.

Research

In a 47-page deep-dive report, the Center for Security and Emerging Technology delved into all of the scientific breakthroughs from 1980 to present that brought EUV lithography to commercialization, including lessons learned for the next emerging technologies.

Researchers at the Paul Scherrer Institute developed a high-performance X-ray tomography technique using burst ptychography, achieving a resolution of 4nm. This method allows for non-destructive imaging of integrated circuits, providing detailed views of nanostructures in materials like silicon and metals.

MIT signed a four-year agreement with the Novo Nordisk Foundation Quantum Computing Programme at University of Copenhagen, focused on accelerating quantum computing hardware research.

MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) developed a mechanically flexible wafer-scale integrated photonics fabrication platform. This enables the creation of flexible photonic circuits that maintain high performance while being bendable and stretchable. It offers significant potential for integrating photonic circuits into various flexible substrate applications in wearable technology, medical devices, and flexible electronics.

The Naval Research Lab identified a new class of semiconductor nanocrystals with bright ground-state excitons, emphasizing an important advancement in optoelectronics.

Researchers from National University of Singapore developed a novel method, known as tension-driven CHARM3D,  to fabricate 3D self-healing circuits, enabling the 3D printing of free-standing metallic structures without the need for support materials and external pressure.

Find more research in our Technical Papers library.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here, including topics such as quantum safe cryptography, analytics for high-volume manufacturing, and mastering EMC simulations for electronic design.

Find Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters here:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

The post Chip Industry Week in Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

In today’s technology-driven landscape in which reducing TCO is top of mind, robust data protection is not merely an option but a necessity. As data, both personal and business-specific, is continuously exchanged, stored, and moved across various platforms and devices, the demand for a secure means of data aggregation and trust enhancement is escalating. Traditional data protection strategies of protecting data at rest and data in motion need to be complemented with protection of data in use. This is where the role of inline memory encryption (IME) becomes critical. It acts as a shield for data in use, thus underpinning confidential computing and ensuring data remains encrypted even when in use. This blog post will guide you through a practical approach to inline memory encryption and confidential computing for enhanced data security.

Understanding inline memory encryption and confidential computing

Inline memory encryption offers a smart answer to data security concerns, encrypting data for storage and decoding only during computation. This is the core concept of confidential computing. As modern applications on personal devices increasingly leverage cloud systems and services, data privacy and security become critical. Confidential computing and zero trust are suggested as solutions, providing data in use protection through hardware-based trusted execution environments. This strategy reduces trust reliance within any compute environment and shrinks hackers’ attack surface.

The security model of confidential computing demands data in use protection, in addition to traditional data at rest and data in motion protection. This usually pertains to data stored in off-chip memory such as DDR memory, regardless of it being volatile or non-volatile memory. Memory encryption suggests data should be encrypted before storage into memory, in either inline or look aside form. The performance demands of modern-day memories for encryption to align with the memory path have given rise to the term inline memory encryption.

There are multiple off-chip memory technologies, and modern NVMS and DDR memory performance requirements make inline encryption the most sensible solution. The XTS algorithm using AES or SM4 ciphers and the GCM algorithm are the commonly used cryptographic algorithms for memory encryption. While the XTS algorithm encrypts data solely for confidentiality, the GCM algorithm provides data encryption and data authentication, but requires extra memory space for metadata storage.

Inline memory encryption is utilized in many systems. When considering inline cipher performance for DDR, the memory performance required for different technologies is considered. For instance, LPDDR5 typically necessitates a data path bandwidth of 25 gigabytes per second. An AES operation involves 10 to 14 rounds of encryption rounds, implying that these 14 rounds must operate at the memory’s required bandwidth. This is achievable with correct pipelining in the crypto engine. Other considerations include minimizing read path latency, support for narrow bursts, memory specific features such as the number of outstanding transactions, data-hazard protection between READ and WRITE paths, and so on. Furthermore, side channel attack protections and data path integrity, a critical factor for robustness in advanced technology nodes, are additional concerns to be taken care without prohibitive PPA overhead.

Ensuring data security in AI and computational storage

The importance of data security is not limited to traditional computing areas but also extends to AI inference and training, which heavily rely on user data. Given the privacy issues and regulatory demands tied to user data, it’s essential to guarantee the encryption of this data, preventing unauthorized access. This necessitates the application of a trusted execution environment and data encryption whenever it’s transported outside this environment. With the advent of new algorithms that call for data sharing and model refinement among multiple parties, it’s crucial to maintain data privacy by implementing appropriate encryption algorithms.

Equally important is the rapidly evolving field of computational storage. The advent of new applications and increasing demands are pushing the boundaries of conventional storage architecture. Solutions such as flexible and composable storage, software-defined storage, and memory duplication and compression algorithms are being introduced to tackle these challenges. Yet, these solutions introduce security vulnerabilities as storage devices operate on raw disk data. To counter this, storage accelerators must be equipped with encryption and decryption capabilities and should manage operations at the storage nodes.

As our computing landscape continues to evolve, we need to address the escalating demand for robust data protection. Inline memory encryption emerges as a key solution, offering data in use protection for confidential computing, securing both personal and business data.

Rambus Inline Memory Encryption IP provide scalable, versatile, and high-performance inline memory encryption solutions that cater to a wide range of application requirements. The ICE-IP-338 is a FIPS certified inline cipher engine supporting AES and SM4, as well as XTS GCM modes of operation. Building on the ICE-IP-338 IP, the ICE-IP-339 provides essential AXI4 operation support, simplifying system integration for XTS operation, delivering confidentiality protection. The IME-IP-340 IP extends basic AXI4 support to narrow data access granularity, as well as AES GCM operations, delivering confidentiality and authentication. Finally, the most recent offering, the Rambus IME-IP-341 guarantees memory encryption with AES-XTS, while supporting the Arm v9 architecture specifications.

For more information, check out my recent IME webinar now available to watch on-demand.

The post A Practical Approach To Inline Memory Encryption And Confidential Computing For Enhanced Data Security appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Low-Power Double Data Rate (LPDDR) emerged as a specialized high performance, low power memory for mobile phones. Since its first release in 2006, each new generation of LPDDR has delivered the bandwidth and capacity needed for major shifts in the mobile user experience. Once again, LPDDR is at the forefront of another key shift as the next wave of generative AI applications will be built into our mobile phones and laptops.

AI on endpoints is all about efficient inference. The process of employing trained AI models to make predictions or decisions requires specialized memory technologies with greater performance that are tailored to the unique demands of endpoint devices. Memory for AI inference on endpoints requires getting the right balance between bandwidth, capacity, power and compactness of form factor.

LPDDR evolved from DDR memory technology as a power-efficient alternative; LPDDR5, and the optional extension LPDDR5X, are the most recent updates to the standard. LPDDR5X is focused on improving performance, power, and flexibility; it offers data rates up to 8.533 Gbps, significantly boosting speed and performance. Compared to DDR5 memory, LPDDR5/5X limits the data bus width to 32 bits, while increasing the data rate. The switch to a quarter-speed clock, as compared to a half-speed clock in LPDDR4, along with a new feature – Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling – keeps the higher data rate LPDDR5 operation within the same thermal budget as LPDDR4-based devices.

Given the space considerations of mobiles, combined with greater memory needs for advanced applications, LPDDR5X can support capacities of up to 64GB by using multiple DRAM dies in a multi-die package. Consider the example of a 7B LLaMa 2 model: the model consumes 3.5GB of memory capacity if based on INT4. A LPDDR5X package of x64, with two LPDDR5X devices per package, provides an aggregate bandwidth of 68 GB/s and, therefore, a LLaMa 2 model can run inference at 19 tokens per second.

As demand for more memory performance grows, we see LPDDR5 evolve in the market with the major vendors announcing additional extensions to LPDDR5 known as LPDDR5T, with the T standing for turbo. LPDDR5T boosts performance to 9.6 Gbps enabling an aggregate bandwidth of 76.8 GB/s in a x64 package of multiple LPDDR5T stacks. Therefore, the above example of a 7B LLaMa 2 model can run inference at 21 tokens per second.

With its low power consumption and high bandwidth capabilities, LPDDR5 is a great choice of memory not just for cutting-edge mobile devices, but also for AI inference on endpoints where power efficiency and compact form factor are crucial considerations. Rambus offers a new LPDDR5T/5X/5 Controller IP that is fully optimized for use in applications requiring high memory throughput and low latency. The Rambus LPDDR5T/5X/5 Controller enables cutting-edge LPDDR5T memory devices and supports all third-party LPDDR5 PHYs. It maximizes bus bandwidth and minimizes latency via look-ahead command processing, bank management and auto-precharge. The controller can be delivered with additional cores such as the In-line ECC or Memory Analyzer cores to improve in-field reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS).

The post LPDDR Memory Is Key For On-Device AI Performance appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Rapidus and IBM are jointly developing mass production capabilities for chiplet-based advanced packages. The collaboration builds on an existing agreement to develop 2nm process technology.

Vanguard and NXP will jointly establish VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (VSMC) in Singapore to build a $7.8 billion, 12-inch wafer plant. This is part of a global supply chain shift “Out of China, Out of Taiwan,” according to TrendForce.

Alphawave joined forces with Arm to develop an advanced chiplet based on Arm’s Neoverse Compute Subystems for AI/ML. The chiplet contains the Neoverse N3 CPU core cluster and Arm Coherent Mesh Network, and will be targeted at HPC in data centers, AI/ML applications, and 5G/6G infrastructure.

ElevATE Semiconductor and GlobalFoundries will partner for high-voltage chips to be produced at GF’s facility in Essex Junction, Vermont, which GF bought from IBM. The chips are essential for semiconductor testing equipment, aerospace, and defense systems.

NVIDIA, OpenAI, and Microsoft are under investigation by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department for violation of antitrust laws in the generative AI industry, according to the New York Times.

Quick links to more news:

Market Reports
Global
In-Depth
Education and Training
Security
Product News
Research
Events and Further Reading

Global

Apollo Global Management will invest $11 billion in Intel’s Fab 34 in Ireland, thereby acquiring a 49% stake in Intel’s Irish manufacturing operations.

imec and ASML opened their jointly run High-NA EUV Lithography Lab in Veldhoven, the Netherlands. The lab will be used to prepare  the next-generation litho for high-volume manufacturing, expected to begin in 2025 or 2026.

Expedera opened a new semiconductor IP design center in India. The location, the sixth of its kind for the company, is aimed at helping to make up for a shortfall in trained technicians, researchers, and engineers in the semiconductor sector.

Foxconn will build an advanced computing center in Taiwan with NVIDIA’s Blackwell platform at its core. The site will feature GB200 servers, which consist of 64 racks and 4,608 GPUs, and will be completed by 2026.

Intel and its 14 partner companies in Japan will use Sharp‘s LCD plants to research semiconductor production technology, a cost reduction move that should also produce income for Sharp, according to Nikkei Asia.

Japan is considering legislation to support the commercial production of advanced semiconductors, per Reuters.

Saudi Arabia aims to establish at least 50 semiconductor design companies as part of a new National Semiconductor Hub, funded with over $266 million.

Air Liquide is opening a new industrial gas production facility in Idaho, which will produce ultra-pure nitrogen and other gases for Micron’s new fab.

Microsoft will invest 33.7 billion Swedish crowns ($3.2 billion) to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Sweden over a two-year period, reports Bloomberg. The company also will invest $1 billion to establish a new data center in northwest Indiana.

AI data centers could consume as much as 9.1% of the electricity generated in the U.S. by 2030, according to a white paper published by the Electric Power Research Institute. That would more than double the electricity currently consumed by data centers, though EPRI notes this is a worst case scenario and advances in efficiency could be a mitigating factor.

Markets and Money

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) announced global semiconductor sales increased 15.8% year-over-year in April, and the group projected a market growth of 16% in 2024. Conversely, global semiconductor equipment billings contracted 2% year-over-year to US$26.4 billion in Q1 2024, while quarter-over-quarter billings dropped 6% during the same period, according to SEMI‘s Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (WWSEMS) Report.

Cadence completed its acquisition of BETA CAE Systems International, a provider of multi-domain, engineering simulation solutions.

Cisco‘s investment arm launched a $1 billion fund to aid AI startups as part of its AI innovation strategy. Nearly $200 million has already been earmarked.

The power and RF GaN markets will grow beyond US$2.45 billion and US$1.9 billion in 2029, respectively, according to Yole, which is offering a webinar on the topic.

The micro LED chip market is predicted to reach $580 million by 2028, driven by head-mounted devices and automotive applications, according to TrendForce. The cost of Micro LED chips may eventually come down due to size miniaturization.

In-Depth

Semiconductor Engineering published its Automotive, Security, and Pervasive Computing newsletter this week, featuring these top stories:

• The Uncertainty Of Certifying AI For Automotive
• Why It’s So Hard To Secure AI Chips
• Toward A Software-Defined Hardware World

More reporting this week:

• Chip Design Digs Deeper Into AI
• Why IC Design Safety Nets Have Limits
• Opportunities Grow For GPU Acceleration

Security

Scott Best, Rambus senior director of Silicon Security Products, delivered a keynote at the Hardwear.io conference this week (below), detailing a $60 billion reverse engineering threat for hardware in just three markets — $30 billion for printer consumables, $20 billion for rechargeable batteries with some type of authentication, and $10 billion for medical devices such as sonogram probes.

Photo source: Ed Sperling/Semiconductor Engineering

wolfSSL debuted wolfHSM for automotive hardware security modules, with its cryptographic library ported to run in automotive HSMs like Infineon’s Aurix Tricore TC3XX.

Cisco integrated AMD Pensando data processing units (DPUs) with its Hypershield security architecture for defending AI-scale data centers.

OMNIVISION released an intelligent CMOS image sensor for human presence detection, infrared facial authentication, and always-on technology with a single sensing camera. And two new image sensors for industrial and consumer security surveillance cameras.

Digital Catapult announced a new cohort of companies will join Digital Security by Design’s Technology Access Program, gaining access to an Arm Morello prototype evaluation hardware kit based on Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI), to find applications across critical UK sectors.

University of Southampton researchers used formal verification to evaluate the hardware reliability of a RISC-V ibex core in the presence of soft errors.

Several institutions published their students’ master’s and PhD work:

• Virginia Tech published a dissertation proposing sPACtre, a defense mechanism that aims to prevent Spectre control-flow attacks on existing hardware.
• Wright State University published a thesis proposing an approach that uses various machine learning models to bring an improvement in hardware Trojan identification with power signal side channel analysis
• Wright State University published a thesis examining the effect of aging on the reliability of SRAM PUFs used for secure and trusted microelectronics IC applications.
• Nanyang Technological University published a Final Year Project proposing a novel SAT-based circuit preprocessing attack based on the concept of logic cones to enhance the efficacy of SAT attacks on complex circuits like multipliers.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a number of alerts/advisories.

Education and Training

Renesas and the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad) signed a three-year MoU to collaborate on VLSI and embedded semiconductor systems, with a focus on R&D and academic interactions to advance the “Make in India” strategy.

Charlie Parker, senior machine learning engineer at Tignis, presented a talk on “Why Every Fab Should Be Using AI.”

Penn State and the National Sun Yat-Sen University (NSYSU) in Taiwan partnered to develop educational and research programs focused on semiconductors and photonics.

Rapidus and Hokkaido University partnered on education and research to enhance Japan’s scientific and technological capabilities and develop human resources for the semiconductor industry.

The University of Minnesota named Steve Koester its first “Chief Semiconductor Officer,” and launched a website devoted to semiconductor and microelectronics research and education.

The state of Michigan invested $10 million toward semiconductor workforce development.

Product News

Siemens reported breakthroughs in high-level C++ verification that will be used in conjunction with its Catapult software. Designers will be able to use formal property checking via the Catapult Formal Assert software and reachability coverage analysis through Catapult Formal CoverCheck.

Infineon released several products:

• 600 V CoolMOS 8 high voltage superjunction (SJ) MOSFET product family.
• CoolGaN bidirectional switch (BDS) and CoolGaN Smart Sense device.
• New CoolSiC MOSFET discretes 650 V, with two product families housed in the Thin-TOLL 8×8 and TOLT packages to increase system power density.

Augmental, an MIT Media Lab spinoff, released a tongue-based computer controller, dubbed the MouthPad.

NVIDIA revealed a new line of products that will form the basis of next-gen AI data centers. Along with partners ASRock Rack, ASUS, GIGABYTE, Ingrasys, and others, the NVIDIA GPUs and networking tech will offer cloud, on-premises, embedded, and edge AI systems. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang showed off the company’s upcoming Rubin platform, which will succeed its current Blackwell platform. The new system will feature new GPUs, an Arm-based CPU and advanced networking with NVLink 6, CX9 SuperNIC and X1600 converged InfiniBand/Ethernet switch.

Intel showed off its Xeon 6 processors at Computex 2024. The company also unveiled architectural details for its Lunar Lake client computing processor, which will use 40% less SoC power, as well as a new NPU, and X2 graphic processing unit cores for gaming.

Research

imec released a roadmap for superconducting digital technology to revolutionize AI/ML.

CEA-Leti reported breakthroughs in three projects it considers key to the next generation of CMOS image sensors. The projects involved embedding AI in the CIS and stacking multiple dies to create 3D architectures.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT-CSAIL) used a type of generative AI, known as diffusion models, to train multi-purpose robots, and designed the Grasping Neural Process for more intelligent robotic grasping.

IBM and Pasqal partnered to develop a common approach to quantum-centric supercomputing and to promote application research in chemistry and materials science.

Stanford University and Q-NEXT researchers investigated diamond to find the source of its temperamental nature when it comes to emitting quantum signals.

TU Wien researchers investigated how AI categorizes images.

In Canada:

• Simon Fraser University received funding of over $80 million from various sources to upgrade the supercomputing facility at the Cedar National Host Site.
• The Digital Research Alliance of Canada announced $10.28 million to renew the University of Victoria’s Arbutus cloud infrastructure.
• The Canadian government invested $18.4 million in quantum research at the University of Waterloo.

Events and Further Reading

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Semiconductor Engineering’s latest newsletters:

Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing
Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

As systems-on-chips (SoCs) become increasingly complex, security functions must grow accordingly to protect the semiconductor devices themselves and the sensitive information residing on or passing through them. While a Root of Trust security solution built into the SoCs can protect the chip and data resident therein (data at rest), many other threats exist which target interception, theft or tampering with the valuable information in off-chip memory (data in use).

Many isolation technologies exist for memory protection, however, with the discovery of the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in 2018, and attacks like row hammer targeting DRAM, security architects realize there are practical threats that can bypass these isolation technologies.

One of the techniques to prevent data being accessed across different guests/domains/zones/realms is memory encryption. With memory encryption in place, even if any of the isolation techniques have been compromised, the data being accessed is still protected by cryptography. To ensure the confidentiality of data, each user has their own protected key. Memory encryption can also prevent physical attacks like hardware bus probing on the DRAM bus interface. It can also prevent tampering with control plane information like the MPU/MMU control bits in DRAM and prevent the unauthorized movement of protected data within the DRAM.

Memory encryption technology must ensure confidentiality of the data. If a “lightweight” algorithm is used, there are no guarantees the data will be protected from mathematic cryptanalysts given that the amount of data used in memory encryption is typically huge. Well known, proven algorithms are either the NIST approved AES or OSCAA approved SM4 algorithms.

The recommended key length is also an important aspect defining the security strength. AES offers 128, 192 or 256-bit security, and SM4 offers 128-bit security. Advanced memory encryption technologies also involve integrity and protocol level anti-replay techniques for high-end use-cases. Proven hash algorithms like SHA-2, SHA-3, SM3 or (AES-)GHASH can be used for integrity protection purposes.

Once one or more of the cipher algorithms are selected, the choice of secure modes of operation must be made. Block Cipher algorithms need to be used in certain specific modes to encrypt bulk data larger than a single block of just 128 bits.

XTS mode, which stands for “XEX (Xor-Encrypt-Xor) with tweak and CTS (Cipher Text Stealing)” mode has been widely adopted for disk encryption. CTS is a clever technique which ensures the number of bytes in the encrypted payload is the same as the number of bytes in the plaintext payload. This is particularly important in storage to ensure the encrypted payload can fit in the same location as would the unencrypted version.

XTS/XEX uses two keys, one key for block encryption, and another key to process a “tweak.” The tweak ensures every block of memory is encrypted differently. Any changes in the plaintext result in a complete change of the ciphertext, preventing an attacker from obtaining any information about the plaintext.

While memory encryption is a critical aspect of security, there are many challenges to designing and implementing a secure memory encryption solution. Rambus is a leading provider of both memory and security technologies and understands the challenges from both the memory and security viewpoints. Rambus provides state-of-the-art Inline Memory Encryption (IME) IP that enables chip designers to build high-performance, secure, and scalable memory encryption solutions.

Additional information:

• Rambus Inline Memory Encryption Engines
• Inline Memory Encryption (IME) to Enable Confidential Computing for Data Center Designs

The post The Importance Of Memory Encryption For Protecting Data In Use appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Chip aging is becoming a much bigger concern inside of data centers, where it can impact server uptime, utilization rates, and the amount of energy needed to drive signals and cool entire server racks.

Aging in chips is the result of both higher logic utilization and increasing transistor density. This is problematic for data centers, in general, but especially for AI chips where digital logic is expected to run at maximum speed. That generates more heat, which becomes harder to dissipate as the number specialized and general-purpose processing elements per square millimeter of silicon continues to rise. Heat typically gets trapped between the fins of finFETs and gate-all-around FETs, accelerating electromigration and reducing the time it takes for dielectrics to break down. It also can cause warpage, which can rupture the bonds and contacts between different components in an advanced package or on a PCB.

For data centers, that creates a number of challenges:

• Thermal management: This requires a deep understanding of workloads and the resulting transient thermal gradients as processing is load-balanced on-chip, between chips or chiplets, and between servers;
• More data: Data from sensors everywhere, along with larger training sets, all need to be processed faster than in the past to keep up with the flood of data, but all of that needs to happen in the same or smaller footprint without overheating any part of a device, and
• In-circuit monitoring: Sensors can be added into chips to detect variations in heat and data speeds in different paths, but it’s much more difficult to keep track of tens of thousands of these monitors as they collect data from heterogeneous processing elements, each of which can age at different rates depending on process variation, defectivity, varying workloads, and ambient thermal conditions.

“Servers are much more capable today than they were 10 years ago, and the issue is that power hasn’t scaled like it used to,” said Steven Woo, Rambus fellow and distinguished inventor. “Now, if you want to do lots more work in your server, you have to burn more power to do it. Twenty years ago, a server might dissipate a couple hundred watts. But with the latest servers that NVIDIA just announced around Grace Blackwell, the whole rack is 120 kilowatts, and the individual servers are many kilowatts. Just delivering power into those racks is causing changes in the infrastructure in the industry. Now that you have to bring in and dissipate more power in a small space, you get all kinds of interesting things that could happen over time. The heat that’s being dissipated can have effects on the chip, and you have to worry sometimes about thermal cycling where, as the chip is doing a lot of work, maybe part of the chip stops and then it does more work. You get these rapid cycles of dissipating a lot of power, then not, then dissipating a lot of power, then not. That cycling causes local heating and cooling, leading to thermal stresses, and this impacts all chips, including memory.”

As a result, everyone from the data center manager to the chip architect now has to understand how a chip behaves in the field, and how increasingly customized chip and system architectures will function over time. Downtime is costly for a data center, but under-utilization and reduced performance also carries a high price tag. That, in turn, affects how much margin is considered essential, such as extra data paths if some of them are fully or partially closed off by electromigration, and how that margin will impact performance, power, and area/cost over a chip’s projected lifetime — especially in a heterogeneous design with specialized compute elements.

“When it comes to the hyper-scalers and high powered, highly customized, heterogeneous chips for various different workloads, these chips are on 24/7, so consistent uptime is critical,” said Dan Lee, product management director at Cadence. “Since all of these chips are done at the really advanced nodes, with the smaller device sizes, more developers are looking to do aging analysis, and derive the wear and tear so they can see if the chip is going to last a year or five years. At the same time, an important consideration is also thermal — especially when we’re talking about these heterogeneous integrations, and you don’t really get the thermal conductivity that you would in a straightforward, monolithic design. There’s a bit more thought or planning that needs to be a part of this because aging and heating are related. All things being equal, if you’re operating in a very hot environment, you’re going to expect a lower lifespan.”

Still, determining how much shorter that lifespan will be isn’t always a precise calculation. “Data center SoCs that execute mission-critical workloads need to provide scalable visibility, predict problems before they occur, provide deep-dive analyses into problems, and be optimized to increase longevity of investment,” said Padmakumar Karthik, senior technology manager at Arm. “Data center diagnostic patterns are often deployed to measure the health of an SoC post-manufacturing to prevent silent data corruption (SDC) issues. But on-chip sensors provide an additional layer of insights, detecting droops or aging or thermal events on-chip, all of which can cause SDC incidents. For this reason, scalable, customizable sensor frameworks that can monitor and adapt throughout the useful life of the device, enabling continuous design optimization and preventive maintenance, will be increasingly important.”

There are multiple ways to achieve this, but each data center can be very different. In some cases, chips are designed by systems companies for internal use. And in most cases, there is a mix of different hardware and software, not all of which is state-of-the-art. “Many data centers have legacy infrastructure that may not be inherently designed for optimal power efficiency,” noted Noam Brousard, vice president of systems at proteanTecs, in a recent blog. “Upgrading or retrofitting such infrastructure poses challenges in achieving comprehensive power optimization.”

Even within a single rack, stresses can vary greatly from one server to the next, and from one chip to the next even in the same server. “You can imagine when you have a very big chip, toward the edges of the chip it will expand more than in a small chip, and that can add stress,” said Rambus’ Woo. “You have to really be careful about how you cool things, and memory is no different. You have very specific things you worry about with memory, like the ability to retain data, depending on how hot the chip is.”

In addition, as chips age, parameters drift. Marc Swinnen, director of product marketing in Ansys’ semiconductor division, said the traditional approach has been to use a library that’s characterized as a brand new chip. “The library is characterized at 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, and you can run all your analysis multiple times with these different aged libraries. That sounds good on paper, and that’s what a lot of people do, but the problem is that not all parts of the chip age at the same rate. This is why aging is often associated with activity and temperature. Some parts of the chip are more active and hotter than other parts of the chip, so the aging time runs differently for different parts. This means you want to apply some of the old library to some parts of the chip, and the younger library to other parts of the chip, because if signals run between them you have setup and hold issues. If everything slows down at the same time — or one slows down and the other one doesn’t — you’re going to get mismatches, and that’s the difficulty. At the bottom level, it’s easy. Every gate is assigned its right age. That’s simple. You do an analysis with every gate. But how do you assign the age to every gate? Where do you get that information from? You need a lot of realistic activity, and then predict that over the lifespan and with temperature. That’s the problem. How do you actually construct this aging map? Once you have it, the analysis is not that hard.”

Aging maps are application- and workload-specific. Every chip will age differently depending on the functions it performs.

But aging is just one of many factors that affect data center uptime. “When we look at data center, we look at the whole application first, then whittle it down to what that means for chips and packages,” said Kelly Morgan, senior principal application engineer at Ansys. “From the mechanical reliability lens of the data center operation, we go through thermal cycling, obviously. We’re in a controlled environment. But what does that influence? How does that influence the integrity of the chips as you go through thermal cycles? Typically, we’ll look at things like solder fatigue and other effects.”

Another factor to consider is shipping and handling, which can affect the aging of a chip, package, and board.

“Even before the device is put in place, there are opportunities for vibration,” Morgan said. “You might hit something, which is a bit of a shock. We have customers who are looking at things like drop, shock, and vibration, and they have goals they need to test to. Typically, the standard process is to do a lot of physical testing. Now as you can imagine, that can be pretty challenging. You have to be pretty far along in the design process before you really start to go and test, and if there’s an issue, then you’ve got to go back and retest. Early simulation helps here, especially for those larger-scale events, and that comes down to the chassis, the board, to all the components, including the ICs.”

Fig. 1: Components of complete electronic system analysis. Source: Ansys

Quality control remains a big challenge when it comes to mechanical stresses that can affect aging. Adam Cron, distinguished architect at Synopsys, pointed to a recent Intel white paper, which noted that at the current acceptable defectivity rates, one core fails every two days. To account for this, Cron noted that certain commercial tools support in-system delay testing in a BiST mode. By adding specific IP, any ATPG patterns could be added to that. (Intel’s paper said its solution only applies to stuck-at testing.)

“In very large, millions-of-cores data center-type environments, the implication is that you’d better be ready,” Cron said. “One of the things they were talking about in this paper was in-system scan. Intel was bringing a database of test patterns in, and then applying it in-system after isolating a core. And then, upon a failure, they’d quarantine and move on. But the data centers are apparently running out of that opportunistic time slot to do any of this. We’ve heard some interesting conversations about the fact that people do run a lot of things during certain times. However, other times are cheaper, so all the holes are just getting filled in terms of runtime. Monitors are certainly something to look at, but monitors are looking at systemic degradation. That’s known, if you will. And so as things degrade, V_min will change, maybe frequency will change. And they’ll be on a pace. They can figure out when to do that. That’s easy enough to figure out. However, if there’s a marginality or some broken component in there, it is not up to the tool to find that. And frankly, the in-system scan wasn’t addressing all components on the die. It was only up to like 80% of stuck-at coverage, which isn’t that much, especially when you’re not looking at all of the pieces inside the die. The point is, there are still opportunities to do better.”

Cron noted that one big systems company suggested a dual-core lockstep mechanism, starting out the data center in dual-core lock-step mode for X number of months. “When it looks like you’ve squeezed the major part of the curve out, in terms of finding these defective components, then unlock them, double your capacity, run like that for a while, and periodically hook some back up again. That means everything is utilized, at least. Of course, some are working at half capacity here and there, but it’s not the whole die. And there are some implications there from a design standpoint, at least for the hardware, but also possibly the operating system, depending on who decides what physical core is used versus what virtual core is used.”

Approaches to measuring aging
Any discussion around aging circuits really boils down to extending the life of the machines in the data center, and not getting caught by surprise when failures occur.

“How do you do that? You have to measure the aging of those machines,” said Neil Hand, director of marketing, IC segment at Siemens EDA. “Right now, if you speak to the CIOs of these big companies with big data centers, they say, ‘We’ve got to get rid of the machines after three years because we can’t risk it going down.’ If you look at embedded analytics capabilities, you can start to embed aging monitors in those devices, you can start to monitor those in real time. It doesn’t look that different than what it does from an automotive perspective. It’s all the same technologies, effectively, but you’re monitoring them. And then you can say, ‘We’re now at 90% of our life for this server.’ We can then just replace that server.”

This feeds into corporate goals around sustainability, as well. “It comes down to building the best thing to begin with, then building it with design for manufacturing in mind so that you don’t get waste during manufacturing, achieve better yields, and finally extend the life of products and build them in environmentally-sustainable ways,” Hand said. “If you can extend the data center lifecycle from three years to five years, that’s big. And especially if you start going to these high-performance, application-specific type of clusters, you may not need to change them as often, because if the underlying capabilities aren’t changing, that might drive the cycling of it. In the case of a biological computer, if there’s no new change to the underlying protein folding mechanisms, you might say, ‘We don’t need a new compute platform. This is really good.”

The longer the product life can be extended, the better. Design for aging is a matter of, first, performing the aging analysis with the foundry models. “Run the simulations and observe the effects,” said Cadence’s Lee. “When you’re doing the simulation, you want to have the right mission profiles, so you come up with an accurate prediction of how your device is going to behave after a certain number of years in deployment. You may want to combine that with thermal analysis, for example, because how that aging is going to behave will depend on what temperature this design is going to be working at. You may think it’s 22 degrees Celsius, but maybe through some thermal analysis you realize it’s actually going to be operating at 35 or 40 degrees most of the time. That may change the outcome of your aging analysis.”

In terms of the associated thermal analysis, this can extend beyond a single device. “It’s also how that heat is moving,” Lee said. “Let’s say you have this integrated design, where you have some power devices alongside some logic, or some other functionality that is lower power. What you may want to understand is, if those bandgaps or power circuits are generating a lot of heat, that may be shifting over into other parts of your design. So when you run your aging analysis, you may assume that you’re running at 25 degrees, whereas the power devices are at 40 or 45 degrees. They’re on the same chip, they’re very close to each other, and you have to understand how much of that heat is moving over to your logic and what that’s going to bring the temperature up to. You want to know that so you can perform the aging analysis based on that higher temperature.”

Another consideration is combining aging analysis and interconnect parasitics, which is especially relevant for advanced nodes due to the parasitics in the interconnect. “They’re dominant when it comes to performance and functionality,” Lee added. “So when thinking about aging, you also have to think about it being an aged device that has to push the electrons through this interconnect. That’s a pretty heavy load. When you’re doing the aging analysis, you probably will have to be doing it with extracted parasitics. You just can’t do it on a pure schematic design. It doesn’t give you enough detail about what’s really happening physically. This may be included in the aging analysis tool. When most people talk about aging, they may not think about the parasitic aspect to it.”

Combating aging, thermal in memory
While standards don’t work in custom silicon, they do work for some standard components in those devices, such as memory. Over the past 10 to 15 years, memory standards have started to address the impact of heat.

“If you start to exceed certain temperature limits, you’ve got to refresh the device more frequently because the charge can leak off the cells more quickly,” said Rambus’ Woo. “So there are temperature-dependent refresh rates. There are other things that can be exacerbated, like the capacitors are getting smaller, they’re holding fewer electrons because there are so many more of them on a chip now, so we’ve seen memories adopt on-die error correction. This on-die error correction is something that is hidden from the outside world. In many cases, you don’t even know an error has occurred and been corrected on the chip. Those kinds of technologies become even more important now because the temperatures can be higher.”

There also is growing demand for more telemetry to provide monitoring information. “You just want to know if anything is overheating,” said Woo. “Does something seem like it’s malfunctioning? The data center manager will get regular updates about the status of the major components of the system. A lot of boards now in servers have baseboard management controllers (BMCs), which are little chips that sit on each board and are responsible for, among other things, reporting back the health of that board when a server might have five or six boards. We’re frequently seeing more of these BMC chips.”

Design for aging
While the goal is to be able to guarantee a certain lifetime for the chips in a data center, the challenges for achieving that are expanding. “There’s a growing list of things that can be harmful to devices over their lifetime,” Woo said. “It’s a balance between not adding too much cost, even though you have to increase the reliability and maybe add new features, and all of these things are in play with each other.”

Whether it is liquid cooling or higher levels of RAS ECC in the system, there is no single best answer for every application. In general, the industry is moving toward higher reliability and increasing resilience, but there are many ways to get there and challenges with each of them.

“Just as 15 years ago we didn’t necessarily always think we had to talk about power, now we have to talk about it all the time,” Woo said. “The same thing is going to be true for resilience and reliability. It’s going to be required to become part of the way people think about architectures, and part of that is how the memory system improves its reliability. You can’t really do anything unless you can compute on some data, and you have to make sure that data is reliable. It will touch how memory is stored in a DRAM. It will touch how memory is communicated across links. And it even will touch how processors manipulate data once they get a hold of it in their caches, and in the compute pipelines. Also, one of the key things people will worry about is how much of that susceptibility is brought about by age-related issues, like heating cycles, etc.”

Finally, there are even issues around the quality of the power that comes into a system. “The servers get noise on the power rails, and it’s a balance between how much money you’re willing to pay for the power delivery versus the quality of power,” said Woo. “You have to be tolerant of those kinds of things, too. Power management becomes more challenging, as well as the amount of power that these systems are using today. NVIDIA systems bring 48-volt power into the racks, and there is talk about even higher voltage levels. Those changes in infrastructure can all impact heat, and can age components differently.”

The post Chip Aging Becoming Key Factor In Data Center Economics appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Power management has received increasing focus in microelectronic systems as the need for greater power density, efficiency and precision have grown apace. One of the important ongoing trends in service of these needs has been the move to localizing power delivery. To optimize system power, it’s best to deliver as high a voltage as possible to the endpoint where the power is consumed. Then at the endpoint, that incoming high voltage can be regulated into the lower voltages with higher currents required by the endpoint components.

We saw this same trend play out in the architecting of the DDR5 generation of computer main memory. In planning for DDR5, the industry laid out ambitious goals for memory bandwidth and capacity. Concurrently, the aim was to maintain power within the same envelope as DDR4 on a per module basis. In order to achieve these goals, DDR5 required a smarter DIMM architecture; one that would embed more intelligence in the DIMM and increase its power efficiency. One of the biggest architectural changes of this smarter DIMM architecture was moving power management from the motherboard to an on-module Power Management IC (PMIC) on each DDR5 RDIMM.

In previous DDR generations, the power regulator on the motherboard had to deliver a low voltage at high current across the motherboard, through a connector and then onto the DIMM. As supply voltages were reduced over time (to maintain power levels at higher data rates), it was a growing challenge to maintain the desired voltage level because of IR drop. By implementing a PMIC on the DDR5 RDIMM, the problem with IR drop was essentially eliminated.

In addition, the on-DIMM PMIC allows for very fine-grain control of the voltage levels supplied to the various components on the DIMM. As such, DIMM suppliers can really dial in the best power levels for the performance target of a particular DIMM configuration. On-DIMM PMICs also offered an economic benefit. Power management on the motherboard meant the regulator had to be designed to support a system with fully populated DIMMs. On-DIMM PMICs means only paying for the power management capacity you need to support your specific system memory configuration.

The upshot is that power management has become a major enabler of increasing memory performance. Advancing memory performance has been the mission of Rambus for nearly 35 years. We’re intimate with memory subsystem design on modules, with expertise across many critical enabling technologies, and have demonstrated the disciplines required to successfully develop chips for the challenging module environment with its increased power density, space constraints and complex thermal management challenges.

As part of the development of our DDR5 memory interface chipset, Rambus built a world-class power management team and has now introduced a new family of DDR5 server PMICs. This new server PMIC product family lays the foundation for a roadmap of future power management chips. As AI continues to expand from training to inference, increasing demands on memory performance will extend beyond servers to client systems and drive the need for new PMIC solutions tailored for emerging use cases and form factors across the computing landscape.

Resources:

• DDR5 server memory interface chipset
• DDR5 server power management ICs
• White Paper: Data Center Evolution: DDR5 DIMMs Advance Server Performance

The post DDR5 PMICs Enable Smarter, Power-Efficient Memory Modules appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

AI has permeated virtually every aspect of our digital lives, from personalized recommendations on streaming platforms to advanced medical diagnostics. Behind the scenes of this AI revolution lies the data center, which houses the hardware, software, and networking infrastructure necessary for training and deploying AI models. Securing AI in the data center relies on data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity throughout the AI lifecycle, from data preprocessing to model training and inference deployment.

High-value datasets containing sensitive information, such as personal health records or financial transactions, must be shielded from unauthorized access. Robust encryption mechanisms, such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), coupled with secure key management practices, form the foundation of data confidentiality in the data center. The encryption key used must be unique and used in a secure environment. Encryption and decryption operations of data are constantly occurring and must be performed to prevent key leakage. Should a compromise arise, it should be possible to renew the key securely and re-encrypt data with the new key.

The encryption key used must also be securely stored in a location that unauthorized processes or individuals cannot access. The keys used must be protected from attempts to read them from the device or attempts to steal them using side-channel techniques such as SCA (Side-Channel Attacks) or FIA (Fault Injection Attacks). The multitenancy aspect of modern data centers calls for robust SCA protection of key data.

Hardware-level security plays a pivotal role in safeguarding AI within the data center, offering built-in protections against a wide range of threats. Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), secure enclaves, and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) provide secure storage and processing environments for sensitive data and cryptographic keys, shielding them from unauthorized access or tampering. By leveraging hardware-based security features, organizations can enhance the resilience of their AI infrastructure and mitigate the risk of attacks targeting software vulnerabilities.

Ideally, secure cryptographic processing is handled by a Root of Trust core. The AI service provider manages the Root of Trust firmware, but it can also load secure applications that customers can write to implement their own cryptographic key management and storage applications. The Root of Trust can be integrated in the host CPU that orchestrates the AI operations, decrypting the AI model and its specific parameters before those are fed to AI or network accelerators (GPUs or NPUs). It can also be directly integrated with the GPUs and NPUs to perform encryption/decryption at that level. These GPUs and NPUs may also select to store AI workloads and inference models in encrypted form in their local memory banks and decrypt the data on the fly when access is required. Dedicated on-the-fly, low latency in-line memory decryption engines based on the AES-XTS algorithm can keep up with the memory bandwidth, ensuring that the process is not slowed down.

AI training workloads are often distributed among dozens of devices connected via PCIe or high-speed networking technology such as 800G Ethernet. An efficient confidentiality and integrity protocol such as MACsec using the AES-GCM algorithm can protect the data in motion over high-speed Ethernet links. AES-GCM engines integrated with the server SoC and the PCIe acceleration boards ensure that traffic is authenticated and optionally encrypted.

Rambus offers a broad portfolio of security IP covering the key security elements needed to protect AI in the data center. Rambus Root of Trust IP cores ensure a secure boot protocol that protects the integrity of its firmware. This can be combined with Rambus inline memory encryption engines, as well as dedicated solutions for MACsec up to 800G.

Resources

• Rambus Root of Trust IP
• Rambus Security Protocol Engine IP

The post Securing AI In The Data Center appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

AI has permeated virtually every aspect of our digital lives, from personalized recommendations on streaming platforms to advanced medical diagnostics. Behind the scenes of this AI revolution lies the data center, which houses the hardware, software, and networking infrastructure necessary for training and deploying AI models. Securing AI in the data center relies on data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity throughout the AI lifecycle, from data preprocessing to model training and inference deployment.

High-value datasets containing sensitive information, such as personal health records or financial transactions, must be shielded from unauthorized access. Robust encryption mechanisms, such as Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), coupled with secure key management practices, form the foundation of data confidentiality in the data center. The encryption key used must be unique and used in a secure environment. Encryption and decryption operations of data are constantly occurring and must be performed to prevent key leakage. Should a compromise arise, it should be possible to renew the key securely and re-encrypt data with the new key.

The encryption key used must also be securely stored in a location that unauthorized processes or individuals cannot access. The keys used must be protected from attempts to read them from the device or attempts to steal them using side-channel techniques such as SCA (Side-Channel Attacks) or FIA (Fault Injection Attacks). The multitenancy aspect of modern data centers calls for robust SCA protection of key data.

Hardware-level security plays a pivotal role in safeguarding AI within the data center, offering built-in protections against a wide range of threats. Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), secure enclaves, and Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) provide secure storage and processing environments for sensitive data and cryptographic keys, shielding them from unauthorized access or tampering. By leveraging hardware-based security features, organizations can enhance the resilience of their AI infrastructure and mitigate the risk of attacks targeting software vulnerabilities.

Ideally, secure cryptographic processing is handled by a Root of Trust core. The AI service provider manages the Root of Trust firmware, but it can also load secure applications that customers can write to implement their own cryptographic key management and storage applications. The Root of Trust can be integrated in the host CPU that orchestrates the AI operations, decrypting the AI model and its specific parameters before those are fed to AI or network accelerators (GPUs or NPUs). It can also be directly integrated with the GPUs and NPUs to perform encryption/decryption at that level. These GPUs and NPUs may also select to store AI workloads and inference models in encrypted form in their local memory banks and decrypt the data on the fly when access is required. Dedicated on-the-fly, low latency in-line memory decryption engines based on the AES-XTS algorithm can keep up with the memory bandwidth, ensuring that the process is not slowed down.

AI training workloads are often distributed among dozens of devices connected via PCIe or high-speed networking technology such as 800G Ethernet. An efficient confidentiality and integrity protocol such as MACsec using the AES-GCM algorithm can protect the data in motion over high-speed Ethernet links. AES-GCM engines integrated with the server SoC and the PCIe acceleration boards ensure that traffic is authenticated and optionally encrypted.

Rambus offers a broad portfolio of security IP covering the key security elements needed to protect AI in the data center. Rambus Root of Trust IP cores ensure a secure boot protocol that protects the integrity of its firmware. This can be combined with Rambus inline memory encryption engines, as well as dedicated solutions for MACsec up to 800G.

Resources

• Rambus Root of Trust IP
• Rambus Security Protocol Engine IP

The post Securing AI In The Data Center appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Samsung and Synopsys collaborated on the first production tapeout of a high-performance mobile SoC design, including CPUs and GPUs, using the Synopsys.ai EDA suite on Samsung Foundry’s gate-all-around (GAA) process. Samsung plans to begin mass production of 2nm process GAA chips in 2025, reports BusinessKorea.

UMC developed the first radio frequency silicon on insulator (RF-SOI)-based 3D IC process for chips used in smartphones and other 5G/6G mobile devices. The process uses wafer-to-wafer bonding technology to address radio frequency interference between stacked dies and reduces die size by 45%.

Fig. 1: UMC’s 3D IC solution for RFSOI technology. Source: UMC

The first programmable chip capable of shaping, splitting, and steering beams of light is now being produced by Skywater Technology and Lumotive. The technology is critical for advancing lidar-based systems used in robotics, automotive, and other 3D sensing applications.

Driven by demand for AI chips, SK hynix revealed it has already booked its entire production of high-bandwidth memory chips for 2024 and is nearly sold out of its production capacity for 2025, reported the Korea Times, while SEMI reported that silicon wafer shipments declined in Q1 2024, quarter over quarter, a 13% drop, attributed to continued weakness in IC fab utilization and inventory adjustments.

PCI-SIG published the CopprLink Internal and External Cable specifications to provide PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 signaling at 32 and 64 GT/s and leverage standard connector form factors for applications including storage, data centers, AI/ML, and disaggregated memory.

The U.S. Department of Commerce (DoC) launched the CHIPS Women in Construction Framework to boost the participation of women and economically disadvantaged people in the workforce, aiming to support on-time and successful completion of CHIPS Act-funded projects. Intel and Micron adopted the framework.

Quick links to more news:

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Global
In-Depth
Education and Training
Security
Product News
Quantum
Research
Events
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Markets and Money

The SiC wafer processing equipment market is growing rapidly, reports Yole. SiC devices will exceed $10B by 2029 at a CAGR of 25%, and the SiC manufacturing tool market is projected to reach $5B by 2026.

imec.xpand launched a €300 million (~$321 million) fund that will invest in semiconductor and nanotechnology startups with the potential to push semiconductor innovation beyond traditional applications and drive next-gen technologies.

Blaize raised $106 million for its programmable graph streaming processor architecture suite and low-code/no-code software platform for edge AI.

Guerrilla RF completed the acquisition of Gallium Semiconductor‘s portfolio of GaN power amplifiers and front-end modules.

About 90% of connected cars sold in 2030 will have embedded 5G capability, reported Counterpoint. Also, about 75% of laptop PCs sold in 2027 will be AI laptop PCs with advanced generative AI, and the global high-level OS (HLOS) or advanced smartwatch market is predicted to grow 15% in 2024.

Global

Powerchip Semiconductor opened a new 300mm facility in northwestern Taiwan targeting the production of AI semiconductors. The facility is expected to produce 50,000 wafers per month at 55, 40, and 28nm nodes.

Taiwan-based KYEC Semiconductor will withdraw its China operations by the third quarter due to increasing geopolitical tensions, reports the South China Morning Post.

Japan will expand its semiconductor export restrictions to China related to four technologies: Scanning electron microscopes, CMOS, FD-SOI, and the outputs of quantum computers, according to TrendForce.

IBM will invest CAD$187 million (~US$137M in Canada’s semiconductor industry, with the bulk of the investment focused on advanced assembly, testing, and packaging operations.

Microsoft will invest US$2.2 billion over the next four years to build Malaysia’s digital infrastructure, create AI skilling opportunities, establish an AI Center of Excellence, and enhance cybersecurity.

In-Depth

New stories and tech talks published by Semiconductor Engineering this week:

• Multi-Die Design Pushes Complexity To The Max
• Design Considerations In Photonics
• Overlay Optimization In Advanced IC Substrates
• Fundamental Issues In Computer Vision Still Unresolved
• Sensor Fusion Challenges In Automotive

Security

Infineon collaborated with ETAS to integrate the ESCRYPT CycurHSM 3.x automotive security software stack into its next-gen AURIX MCUs to optimize security, performance, and functionality.

Synopsys released Polaris Assist, an AI-powered application security assistant on its Polaris Software Integrity Platform, combining LLM technology with application security knowledge and intelligence.

In security research:

• UT Dallas, Intel, NXP, and TI published a framework for early anomaly detection in AMS components of automotive SoCs.
• The University of Central Florida said that LLMs can be harnessed to automatically rectify security-relevant vulnerabilities inherent in hardware designs within the semiconductor context.
• Western University leveraged hardware security modules for enhanced intra-domain security.
• A team in India proposed a post-quantum secure PUF-based cross-domain authentication mechanism for Internet of Drones.

U.S. President Biden signed a National Security Memorandum to enhance the resilience of critical infrastructure, and the White House announced key actions taken since Biden’s AI Executive Order, including measures to mitigate risk.

CISA and partners published a fact sheet on pro-Russia hacktivists who seek to compromise industrial control systems and small-scale operational technology systems in North American and European critical infrastructure sectors. CISA issued other alerts including two Microsoft vulnerabilities.

Education and Training

The U.S. National Institute for Innovation and Technology (NIIT) and the Department of Labor (DoL) partnered to celebrate the inaugural Youth Apprenticeship Week on May 5 to 11, highlighting opportunities in critical industries such as semiconductors and advanced manufacturing.

SUNY Poly received an additional $4 million from New York State for its Semiconductor Processing to Packaging Research, Education, and Training Center.

The University of Pennsylvania launched an online Master of Science in Engineering in AI degree.

The American University of Armenia celebrated its 10-year collaboration with Siemens, which provides AUA’s Engineering Research Center with annual research grants.

Product News

Renesas and SEGGER Embedded Studio launched integrated code generator support for its 32-bit RISC-V MCU. 

Rambus introduced a family of DDR5 server Power Management ICs (PMICs), including an extreme current device for high-performance applications.

Fig. 2: Rambus’ server PMIC on DDR5 RDIMM. Source: Rambus

Keysight added capabilities to Inspector, part of the company’s recently acquired device security research and test lab Riscure, that are designed to test the robustness of post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and help device and chip vendors identify and fix hardware vulnerabilities. Keysight also validated new conformance test cases for narrowband IoT non-terrestrial networks standards.

Ansys’ RedHawk-SC and Totem power integrity platforms were certified for TSMC‘s N2 nanosheet-based process technology, while its RaptorX solution for on-chip electromagnetic modeling was certified for TSMC’s N5 process.

Netherlands-based athleisure brand PREMIUM INC selected CLEVR to implement Siemens’ Mendix Digital Lifecycle Management for Fashion & Retail solution.

Micron will begin shipping high-capacity DRAM for AI data centers.

Microchip uncorked radiation-tolerant SoC FPGAs for space applications that uses a real-time Linux-capable RISC-V-based microprocessor subsystem.

Quantum

University of Chicago researchers developed a system to boost the efficiency of quantum error correction using a framework based on quantum low-density party-check (qLDPC) codes and new hardware involving reconfigurable atom arrays.

PsiQuantum will receive AUD $940 million (~$620 million) in equity, grants, and loans from the Australian and Queensland governments to deploy a utility-scale quantum computer in the regime of 1 million physical qubits in Brisbane, Australia.

Japan-based RIKEN will co-locate IBM’s Quantum System Two with its Fugaku supercomputer for integrated quantum-classical workflows in a heterogeneous quantum-HPC hybrid computing environment. Fugaku is currently one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

QuEra Computing was awarded a ¥6.5 billion (~$41 million) contract by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to deliver a gate-based neutral-atom quantum computer alongside AIST’s ABCI-Q supercomputer as part of a quantum-classical computing platform.

Novo Holdings, the controlling stakeholder of pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, plans to boost the quantum technology startup ecosystem in Denmark with DKK 1.4 billion (~$201 million) in investments.

The University of Sydney received AUD $18.4 million (~$12 million) from the Australian government to help grow the quantum industry and ecosystem.

The European Commission plans to spend €112 million (~$120 million) to support AI and quantum research and innovation.

Research

Intel researchers developed a 300-millimeter cryogenic probing process to collect high-volume data on the performance of silicon spin qubit devices across whole wafers using CMOS manufacturing techniques.

EPFL researchers used a form of ML called deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to train a four-legged robot to avoid falls by switching between walking, trotting, and pronking.=

The University of Cambridge researchers developed tiny, flexible nerve cuff devices that can wrap around individual nerve fibers without damaging them, useful to treat a range of neurological disorders.

Argonne National Laboratory and Toyota are exploring a direct recycling approach that carefully extracts components from spent batteries. Argonne is also working with Talon Metals on a process that could increase the number of EV batteries produced from mined nickel ore.

Events

Find upcoming chip industry events here, including:

Upcoming webinars are here.

Further Reading

Read the latest special reports and top stories, or check out the latest newsletters:

Systems and Design
Low Power-High Performance
Test, Measurement and Analytics
Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials
Automotive, Security and Pervasive Computing

The post Chip Industry Week In Review appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Advanced process nodes and higher silicon densities are heightening DRAM’s susceptibility to Rowhammer attacks, as reduced cell spacing significantly decreases the hammer count needed for bit flips.

Rowhammer exploits DRAM’s single-capacitor-per-bit design to trigger bit flips in adjacent cells through repeated memory row accesses. This vulnerability allows attackers to manipulate data, recover sensitive information, and crash processes or systems. First identified in 2014, evolving Rowhammer variants continue to target DRAM, successfully bypassing security techniques such as error correction code (ECC) and transactional row refresh (TRR).

Fig. 1: DRAMs on a DIMM, with corresponding mapping of row addresses and DRAM banks. A RowHammer attack can flip bits in the same victim row in multiple DRAMs, overwhelming ECC protection. Source: Rambus

Effectively protecting DRAM against Rowhammer requires a multi-layer, system-level implementation of robust security techniques, from encryption and obfuscation to enforced data isolation and advanced error correction schemes. This is easier said than done, however, as countermeasures can potentially impact power, performance, and area (PPA). Engineers should therefore evaluate PPA-security tradeoffs alongside key features and components at the start of the design process.

A top-down, system-level approach to securing DRAM
“Security is always a cat-and-mouse game, and the evolution of Rowhammer attacks and defenses is no different,” said Nicole Fern, senior security analyst at Riscure. “Researchers have demonstrated successful Rowhammer attacks on commercial DRAM modules employing both TRR and ECC, recovering TLS signing keys in several cryptographic libraries (Amazon-s2n (CVE-2022-42962), WolfSSL (CVE-2022-42961), and LibreSSL (CVE-2022-42963). Many speculate that real-world attacks are imminent. For countermeasures, the question should not be, ‘Will they ultimately be able to counter Rowhammer attacks in general?’ Rather, the question should be: ‘For a specific system and threat model, is the attack effort greater than the value of the assets being targeted and costs of a successful attack?’”

Traditionally, only PPA tradeoffs are considered during the silicon design process. However, recent hardware-based attacks, including Rowhammer, Meltdown, and Spectre, and those exploiting DVFS features to inject faults from software—such as clkscrew and Plundervolt—highlight the importance of prioritizing security during the design process. “Often, it is new features added for performance that create a foothold for attacks,” explained Fern. “As DRAM technology [nodes] shrink over time, with density and performance improving, susceptibility to Rowhammer increases. [Engineers] need to be aware of this effect and proactively design in appropriate countermeasures — with thorough testing ensuring these perform as expected as DRAM technology evolves.”

Jason Oberg, co-founder and CTO at Cycuity, agrees. “Hardware susceptibility is a key component of a larger chain of weaknesses used to exploit vulnerabilities. Rowhammer, a physical attack that’s done remotely, is one of those easy-to-exploit vectors, because if you can flip or modify a bit, you can chain that together with other software-based exploits. In isolation, it may be less of an issue, but in the context of a bigger strain of weaknesses that someone is exploiting, it’s problematic. Many systems vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre, for example, are also points of concern for exploits like Rowhamer. You wouldn’t worry about these attacks on your smart light bulb or robot vacuum, but I would be concerned about my phone or laptop.”

To address these concerns, various encryption and obfuscation techniques have been proposed to protect DRAM from Rowhammer attacks. “If you encrypt or obfuscate your data, and then someone hammers a row and causes bits to flip, they won’t be able to target a specific bit,” Oberg explained. “They won’t know what the specific bit is. Whereas if it’s just plain text and it’s like a supervisor bit and they know where that supervisor bit is, then they can be very direct with what they’re doing.”

Although these techniques are crucial, Oberg emphasized that security considerations must be part of the design process, starting at the architectural level. “If I’m building a chip using licensed IP, I need to take a step back, analyze its function, and determine the assets that need to be protected,” Oberg noted. “From there, you can license a hardware-based root of trust. Maybe you trust one and not the other, even though it’s cheaper. These are the kind of decisions you should drive at the top level, and then try to manage as best you can without having full control of everything in your supply chain.”

Analyzing a system holistically also allows the design team to reduce the impact of security mitigation on PPA. “If you jump straight into saying, ‘I am concerned about memory,’ then you’re already very isolated,” he said. “If you start picking at each of the weaknesses independently, then the overhead goes up a lot higher because there may be an overlap between [mitigation techniques]. So you should take a higher-level view. It’s important to look at that top level and then drive your security program from that level. If you drive it from the bottom up, you’re going to have huge overheads, a lot of complexity, and you’re going to have problems.”

Ultimately, Oberg sees a combination of system-wide hardware and software solutions, paired with strict access controls and enforced data isolation, as a more effective method of countering exploits like Rowhammer. “In any multi-tenant or shared environment, containers are needed to isolate data. Data should also be assigned, for example, to processor thread A where it can’t be read by another thread. Of course, it can’t just be software. Foundation-level hardware protections are required. Otherwise, software protection will be subverted.”

Siloing processes and tagging memory
Kos Gitchev, senior technical market manager at Cadence, pointed to Arm’s confidential compute architecture (CCA) and memory tagging extension (MTE) as examples of a multi-layered, system-centric defense strategy against various attacks and exploits, including Rowhammer and RAMBleed. CCA ensures data protection during processing by isolating or siloing computation in a secure, hardware-backed environment, while MTE tags memory allocations with metadata that is verified during runtime operations. Although not specifically designed to counter Rowhammer or RAMBleed, both mechanisms help protect against such exploits.

“A Rowhammer attacker can’t say: ‘Well, I’ve taken over the machine and I want to go read this memory,’” Gitchev explained. “If you don’t have the appropriate MTE tags for your process, then you won’t be able to read it. The system will basically block it.”

To protect data held in DRAM, 128-bit or 256-bit AES encryption is also essential. “This is generally done by the memory subsystem, not the DRAM itself,” Gitchev noted. “Blocks of data will come in, they’ll get encrypted, and then pass to the memory. If anything happens to the encrypted data, it won’t properly decrypt. Encryption is almost always done in conjunction with ECC, so there are almost two layers of protection when you implement this scheme.”

Gitchev emphasized that encryption is only effective if keys are properly managed and secured. “A memory subsystem does the encryption. It has the algorithm and adds the XTS extension. Even when you write two blocks of the same data, they’ll look different on the bus to the memory. Of course, all of this can be overcome if someone compromises the encryption key.”

AES encryption can be added without major PPA penalties, making it an optimal choice for memory subsystems. “There are many different encryption schemes out there, but AES is easiest to implement,” said Gitchev. “Adding encryption, however, does increase the number of gates and power. To be fair, most of the memory subsystem power goes into driving the interface [for transferring data off-chip to the memory and back]. There is also a little bit of performance and area cost. The memory subsystem is now bigger because it needs to execute complex mathematical calculations for encryption and decryption in real time without significant latency.”

Tightly coupling encryption and decryption ciphering functions inside the DDR or LPDDR controllers facilitates maximum memory efficiency and lowest overall latency. “When doing both functions separately, certain functionality may have to be repeated, such as bus interface logic or support for read-modify-write operations,” said Ruud Derwig, system architect, solutions group at Synopsys. “When tightly integrated, the scheduler inside the controller can request encryption and decryption at the most optimal times, for example, when overlapping other controller operations or while waiting for data.”

Rowhammer and its variants aren’t necessarily the primary drivers for memory encryption solutions that require secure key management. “Inline memory encryption (IME) is mainly intended to defend against cold-boot attacks and provide confidential compute features,” Derwig said. “For example, a newly created virtual machine (VM) or process may get access to physical memory pages used previously by another VM or process when memory is not erased first, compromising the confidentiality of that previous computing context. With proper key management, IME mitigates these compromises. Or, when the hypervisor itself cannot be trusted, confidentiality of user data is still guaranteed by using different IME keys for different privilege levels and VMs.”

Nevertheless, IME contributes to Rowhammer attack countermeasures, as post-encryption data in the memory appears random to attackers. “Certain data patterns — rowstriped or checker patterns, for example — give the highest success rate for row hammering,” Derwig elaborated. “Moreover, when a single or a few bits are flipped, this is amplified to a full 128-bit decrypted block getting random data, so exploiting bit flips becomes much harder. When there is no attacker control over the changes, it is more likely to get detected by causing malfunctioning. IME [also offers] cryptographically strong integrity protection that mitigates bypassing less strong ECC protection.”

The cycle of Rowhammer attacks and countermeasures will continue as new vulnerabilities are identified and addressed. “Multi-level defenses and mitigations, such as hardware design of memory chips and memory controllers, as well as system software mitigations in hypervisors and operating systems, are needed to [counter] evolving threats,” Derwig added.

Bolstering DRAM reliability in data centers
Although Rowhammer can target any device equipped with DRAM, protecting the data center remains a priority for the semiconductor industry and many security researchers. “New memory used to debut in high-performance PCs and then move into servers,” said Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus Labs. “These days, new memory technologies debut for AI [applications] in data centers. The concern is, ‘What if somebody gains access to many servers in the data center and launches programs that intentionally try to repeatedly activate addresses?’ If enough bits flip and can’t be corrected, it could cause what looks like a large hardware fault. You might have to take down memory channels or a machine.”

While the risks of Rowhammer and other exploits in the data center are well known, the semiconductor industry may need more time to comprehensively bolster DRAM security and reliability at the design and system levels. “If you go back 25 or 30 years, nobody was really that concerned about power,” Woo stated. “You can dissipate the heat. You just burn a little more power to get more performance. But today, power is a first-class design parameter that everybody thinks about. Reliability is in that same place that power was in the 2000 to 2005 timeframe, where people are starting to realize, ‘Well, wait a minute, things aren’t infinitely reliable. We’re now going to have to consider DRAM reliability as a first-class design parameter.'”

As DRAM process geometries continue to shrink, electronic engineers will need to develop new or improved architectures and techniques that resist deliberate and repeated errors caused by attackers. “And the tradeoff is, ‘What are you willing to pay to do that? Is there a performance hit? Is there an area hit? Are we storing lots of extra bits?’ In 10 years, we’ll look back and we’ll be talking about reliability in the same way that we talk about power today,” he said.

Bolstering DRAM security and reliability without significantly impacting PPA was the primary driver behind the development of Rambus Labs’ RAMPART: Rowhammer mitigation and repair for server memory systems. Essentially, RAMPART mitigates Rowhammer attacks and improves server memory system reliability by remapping addresses in each DRAM, confining bit flips to a single device for any victim row address. When paired with existing error detection and correction methods, such as single-device data correction (SDDC) and patrol scrub, the system successfully detects and corrects bit flips. To effectively minimize mitigation overhead, RAMPART employs BRC-VL, a variation of DDR5’s bounded refresh configuration (BRC).

Fig. 2: RAMPART row address mappings produce unique neighbors, so Rowhammer attacks have different victim addresses in each DRAM. (a) Circular left shifts of controller row addresses based on unique DRAM IDs are shown. The tables at the bottom illustrate how controller row addresses map to internal bank rows in each DRAM. Row addresses 0x0000 and 0x0001 are bolded to highlight increasing separation with larger shifts. (b) Hammering controller row address 0x0001 flips bits in controller row addresses 0x0000 and 0x0002 in DRAM 0, but controller row addresses 0x8000 and 0x8001 in DRAM 1. A subsequent read to controller row address 0x0000 sees errors only from DRAM 0 that can be corrected with SDDC ECC. Source: Rambus

Assuming 70% area utilization and conservative routing, RAMPART reaches a speed of 2.85GHz in an area of 3910µm², or roughly 51K NAND2 gates. For a server with 1,024 banks, the total area required is only 0.1251mm². “We did a sample implementation at TSMC’s 7nm process, showing RAMPART’s small [footprint],” Woo said. “The controller side of it that does the tracking and figures out how often to issue a mitigation operation is very small, just a few gates. It’s very reasonable to implement something like this in a memory controller, and it has no die size impact as far as we can tell. There’s no latency impact on the accesses. It’s a very simple remapping change. And the DRAM is already doing remapping, so it’s not like asking for a new function. It’s simply modifying an existing function.

Conclusion
The continued proliferation of new and improved Rowhammer variants highlights the critical importance of implementing multi-layered, system-level countermeasures to protect DRAM, alongside of other key components and features. These should encompass a wide range of security techniques, from encryption and obfuscation to advanced error correction, address remapping, and data isolation. Still, to fully optimize performance and minimize latency, PPA security tradeoffs must be assessed from the top down at the start of the design process.

Related Reading
Power/Performance Costs Of Securing Systems
Security requires significant overhead, but it is no longer an option to ignore it. Cybercriminals will continue to exploit weak components.
Developing An Unbreakable Cybersecurity System
New approaches are in research, but threats continue to grow.
DRAM Choices Are Suddenly Much More Complicated
The number of options and tradeoffs is exploding as multiple flavors of DRAM are combined in a single design.

The post Securing DRAM Against Evolving Rowhammer Threats appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Chiplets are gaining renewed attention in the automotive market, where increasing electrification and intense competition are forcing companies to accelerate their design and production schedules.

Electrification has lit a fire under some of the biggest and best-known carmakers, which are struggling to remain competitive in the face of very short market windows and constantly changing requirements. Unlike in the past, when carmakers typically ran on five- to seven-year design cycles, the latest technology in vehicles today may well be considered dated within several years. And if they cannot keep up, there is a whole new crop of startups producing cheap vehicles with the ability to update or change out features as quickly as a software update.

But software has speed, security, and reliability limitations, and being able to customize the hardware is where many automakers are now putting their efforts. This is where chiplets fit in, and the focus now is on how to build enough interoperability across large ecosystems to make this a plug-and-play market. The key factors to enable automotive chiplet interoperability include standardization, interconnect technologies, communication protocols, power and thermal management, security, testing, and ecosystem collaboration.

Similar to non-automotive applications at the board level, many design efforts are focusing on a die-to-die approach, which is driving a number of novel design considerations and tradeoffs. At the chip level, the interconnects between various processors, chips, memory, and I/O are becoming more complex due to increased design performance requirements, spurring a flurry of standards activities. Different interconnect and interface types have been proposed to serve varying purposes, while emerging chiplet technologies for dedicated functions — processors, memories, and I/Os, to name a few — are changing the approach to chip design.

“There is a realization by automotive OEMs that to control their own destiny, they’re going to have to control their own SoCs,” said David Fritz, vice president of virtual and hybrid systems at Siemens EDA. “However, they don’t understand how far along EDA has come since they were in college in 1982. Also, they believe they need to go to the latest process node, where a mask set is going to cost $100 million. They can’t afford that. They also don’t have access to talent because the talent pool is fairly small. With all that together comes the realization by the OEMs that to control their destiny, they need a technology that’s developed by others, but which can be combined however needed to have a unique differentiated product they are confident is future-proof for at least a few model years. Then it becomes economically viable. The only thing that fits the bill is chiplets.”

Chiplets can be optimized for specific functions, which can help automakers meet reliability, safety, security requirements with technology that has been proven across multiple vehicle designs. In addition, they can shorten time to market and ultimately reduce the cost of different features and functions.

Demand for chips has been on the rise for the past decade. According to Allied Market Research, global automotive chip demand will grow from $49.8 billion in 2021 to $121.3 billion by 2031. That growth will attract even more automotive chip innovation and investment, and chiplets are expected to be a big beneficiary.

But the marketplace for chiplets will take time to mature, and it will likely roll out in phases.  Initially, a vendor will provide different flavors of proprietary dies. Then, partners will work together to supply chiplets to support each other, as has already happened with some vendors. The final stage will be universally interoperable chiplets, as supported by UCIe or some other interconnect scheme.

Getting to the final stage will be the hardest, and it will require significant changes. To ensure interoperability, large enough portions of the automotive ecosystem and supply chain must come together, including hardware and software developers, foundries, OSATs, and material and equipment suppliers.

Momentum is building
On the plus side, not all of this is starting from scratch. At the board level, modules and sub-systems always have used onboard chip-to-chip interfaces, and they will continue to do so. Various chip and IP providers, including Cadence, Diode, Microchip, NXP, Renesas, Rambus, Infineon, Arm, and Synopsys, provide off-the-shelf interface chips or IP to create the interface silicon.

The Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) Consortium is the driving force behind the die-to-die, open interconnect standard. The group released its latest UCIe 1.1 specification in August 2023. Board members include Alibaba, AMD, Arm, ASE, Google Cloud, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, and others. Industry partners are showing widespread support. AIB and Bunch of Wires (BoW) also have been proposed. In addition, Arm just released its own Chiplet System Architecture, along with an updated AMBA spec to standardize protocols for chiplets.

“Chiplets are already here, driven by necessity,” said Arif Khan, senior product marketing group director for design IP at Cadence. “The growing processor and SoC sizes are hitting the reticle limit and the diseconomies of scale. Incremental gains from process technology advances are lower than rising cost per transistor and design. The advances in packaging technology (2.5D/3D) and interface standardization at a die-to-die level, such as UCIe, will facilitate chiplet development.”

Nearly all of the chiplets used today are developed in-house by big chipmakers such as Intel, AMD, and Marvell, because they can tightly control the characteristics and behavior of those chiplets. But there is work underway at every level to open this market to more players. When that happens, smaller companies can begin capitalizing on what the high-profile trailblazers have accomplished so far, and innovating around those developments.

“Many of us believe the dream of having an off-the-shelf, interoperable chiplet portfolio will likely take years before becoming a reality,” said Guillaume Boillet, senior director strategic marketing at Arteris, adding that interoperability will emerge from groups of partners who are addressing the risk of incomplete specifications.

This also is raising the attractiveness of FPGAs and eFPGAs, which can provide a level of customization and updates for hardware in the field. “Chiplets are a real thing,” said Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix. “Right now, a company building two or more chiplets can operate much more economically than a company building near-reticle-size die with almost no yield. Chiplet standardization still appears to be far away. Even UCIe is not a fixed standard yet. Not all agree on UCIe, bare die testing, and who owns the problem when the integrated package doesn’t work, etc. We do have some customers who use or are evaluating eFPGA for interfaces where standards are in flux like UCIe. They can implement silicon now and use the eFPGA to conform to standards changes later.”

There are other efforts supporting chiplets, as well, although for somewhat different reasons — notably, the rising cost of device scaling and the need to incorporate more features into chips, which are reticle-constrained at the most advanced nodes. But those efforts also pave the way for chiplets in automotive, and there is strong industry backing to make this all work. For example, under the sponsorship of SEMI, ASME, and three IEEE Societies, the new Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap (HIR) looks at various microelectronics design, materials, and packaging issues to come up with a roadmap for the semiconductor industry. Their current focus includes 2.5D, 3D-ICs, wafer-level packaging, integrated photonics, MEMS and sensors, and system-in-package (SiP), aerospace, automotive, and more.

At the recent Heterogeneous Integration Global Summit 2023, representatives from AMD, Applied Materials, ASE, Lam Research, MediaTek, Micron, Onto Innovation, TSMC, and others demonstrated strong support for chiplets. Another group that supports chiplets is the Chiplet Design Exchange (CDX) working group , which is part of the Open Domain Specific Architecture (ODSA) and the Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP). The Chiplet Design Exchange (CDX) charter focuses on the various characteristics of chiplet and chiplet integration, including electrical, mechanical, and thermal design exchange standards of the 2.5D stacked, and 3D Integrated Circuits (3D-ICs). Its representatives include Ansys, Applied Materials, Arm, Ayar Labs, Broadcom, Cadence, Intel, Macom, Marvell, Microsemi, NXP, Siemens EDA, Synopsys, and others.

“The things that automotive companies want in terms of what each chiplet does in terms of functionality is still in an upheaval mode,” Siemens’ Fritz noted. “One extreme has these problems, the other extreme has those problems. This is the sweet spot. This is what’s needed. And these are the types of companies that can go off and do that sort of work, and then you could put them together. Then this interoperability thing is not a big deal. The OEM can make it too complex by saying, ‘I have to handle that whole spectrum of possibilities.’ The alternative is that they could say, ‘It’s just like a high speed PCIe. If I want to communicate from one to the other, I already know how to do that. I’ve got drivers that are running my operating system. That would solve an awful lot of problems, and that’s where I believe it’s going to end up.”

One path to universal chiplet development?

Moving forward, chiplets are a focal point for both the automotive and chip industries, and that will involve everything from chiplet IP to memory interconnects and customization options and limitations.

For example, Renesas Electronics announced in November 2023 plans for its next-generation SoCs and MCUs. The company is targeting all major applications across the automotive digital domain, including advance information about its fifth-generation R-Car SoC for high-performance applications with advanced in-package chiplet integration technology, which is meant to provide automotive engineers greater flexibility to customize their designs.

Renesas noted that if more AI performance is required in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), engineers will have the capability to integrate AI accelerators into a single chip. The company said this roadmap comes after years of collaboration and discussions with Tier 1 and OEM customers, which have been clamoring for a way to accelerate development without compromising quality, including designing and verifying the software even before the hardware is available.

“Due to the ever increasing needs to increase compute on demand, and the increasing need for higher levels of autonomy in the cars of tomorrow, we see challenges in monolithic solutions scaling and providing the performance needs of the market in the upcoming years,” said Vasanth Waran, senior director for SoC Business & Strategies at Renesas. “Chiplets allows for the compute solutions to scale above and beyond the needs of the market.”

Renesas announced plans to create a chiplet-based product family specifically targeted at the automotive market starting in 2025.

Standard interfaces allow for SoC customization
It is not entirely clear how much overlap there will be between standard processors, which is where most chiplets are used today, and chiplets developed for automotive applications. But the underlying technologies and developments certainly will build off each other as this technology shifts into new markets.

“Whether it is an AI accelerator or ADAS automotive application, customers need standard interface IP blocks,” noted David Ridgeway, senior product manager, IP accelerated solutions group at Synopsys. “It is important to provide fully verified IP subsystems around their IP customization requirements to support the subsystem components used in the customers’ SoCs. When I say customization, you might not realize how customizable IP has become over the course of the last 10 to 20 years, on the PHY side as well as the controller side. For example, PCI Express has gone from PCIe Gen 3 to Gen 4 to Gen 5 and now Gen 6. The controller can be configured to support multiple bifurcation modes of smaller link widths, including one x16, two x8, or four x4. Our subsystem IP team works with customers to ensure all the customization requirements are met. For AI applications, signal and power integrity is extremely important to meet their performance requirements. Almost all our customers are seeking to push the envelope to achieve the highest memory bandwidth speeds possible so that their TPU can process many more transactions per second. Whenever the applications are cloud computing or artificial intelligence, customers want the fastest response rate possible.”

Fig 1: IP blocks including processor, digital, PHY, and verification help developers implement the entire SoC. Source: Synopsys

Optimizing PPA serves the ultimate goal of increasing efficiency, and this makes chiplets particularly attractive in automotive applications. When UCIe matures, it is expected to improve overall performance exponentially. For example, UCIe can deliver a shoreline bandwidth of 28 to 224 GB/s/mm in a standard package, and 165 to 1317 GB/s/mm in an advanced package. This represents a performance improvement of 20- to 100-fold. Bringing latency down from 20ns to 2ns represents a 10-fold improvement. Around 10 times greater power efficiency, at 0.5 pJ/b (standard package) and 0.25 pJ/b (advanced package), is another plus. The key is shortening the interface distance whenever possible.

To optimize chiplet designs, the UCIe Consortium provides some suggestions:

• Careful planning consideration of architectural cut-lines (i.e. chiplet boundaries), optimizing for power, latency, silicon area, and IP reuse. For example, customizing one chiplet that needs a leading-edge process node while re-using other chiplets on older nodes may impact cost and time.
• Thermal and mechanical packaging constraints need to be planned out for package thermal envelopes, hot spots, chiplet placements and I/O routing and breakouts.
• Process nodes need to be carefully selected, particularly in the context of the associated power delivery scheme.
• Test strategy for chiplets and packaged/assembled parts need to be developed up front to ensure silicon issues are caught at the chiplet-level testing phase rather than after they are assembled into a package.

Conclusion
The idea of standardizing die-to-die interfaces is catching on quickly but the path to get there will take time, effort, and a lot of collaboration among companies that rarely talk with each other. Building a vehicle takes one determine carmaker. Building a vehicle with chiplets requires an entire ecosystem that includes the developers, foundries, OSATs, and material and equipment suppliers to work together.

Automotive OEMs are experts at putting systems together and at finding innovative ways to cut costs. But it remains to seen how quickly and effectively they can build and leverage an ecosystem of interoperable chiplets to shrink design cycles, improve customization, and adapt to a world in which the leading edge technology may be outdated by the time it is fully designed, tested, and available to consumers.

— Ann Mutschler contributed to this report.

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