Vast Universe Of Transistors, Worm-Bot Innovation, Glass-Based Processor Enhancement, And Atomically Efficient Chips


What’s a sextillion? It’s the number one followed by 21 zeros — outnumbering the stars in the Milky Way. Industry analyst Jim Handy estimates that 13 sextillion transistors have been manufactured by the chip industry since the first one sprang to life in late 1947. Today, as modern graphics and artificial intelligence chips each contain billions of transistors, and the total continues t... » read more

ESD Alliance And SEMI Efforts To Combat Design Automation Software Piracy


Piracy is a growing concern for all software providers, especially those of us with complex and specialized software, such as chip design automation software that is expensive to develop and maintain. That’s why the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance), a SEMI Technology Community, spearheaded an industry joint development effort to develop a server certification protocol that ... » read more

Integrating Digital Twins In Semiconductor Operations


By Mark da Silva, Nishita Rao and Karim Somani Chipmakers must adopt transformative technologies including Digital Twins (DT) to keep pace with unprecedented global semiconductor industry growth that is expected to drive its total market value to $1 trillion[1] as soon as 2030. Leveraging predictive modeling and other efficiency-enhancing innovations, DTs promise to optimize semiconductor d... » read more

Semiconductors Accelerate The Artificial Intelligence Revolution


By Ajit Manocha, Pushkar Apte, and Melissa Grupen-Shemansky Five years ago, SEMI published an article predicting that Artificial Intelligence (AI) would change everything – and it has! AI has moved out of labs and taken popular imagination by storm. It is now a hot topic of discussion everywhere, from family dining tables and corporate boardrooms to corridors of government. While it m... » read more

Shaping A Sustainable $1 Trillion Era


The semiconductor industry remains on course to reach a total of US$1 trillion in global revenue by 2030, with the journey from US$600 billion expected to take just a decade. At the CEO Summit during SEMICON Europa 2023, SEMI Europe President Laith Altimime attributed this remarkable growth to powerful megatrends, most notably artificial intelligence (AI). AI, in turn, is creating new opport... » read more

Maximizing Edge Intelligence Requires More Than Computing


By Toshi Nishida, Avik W. Ghosh, Swaminathan Rajaraman, and Mircea Stan Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components have enabled a commodity market for Wi-Fi-connected appliances, consumer products, infrastructure, manufacturing, vehicles, and wearables. However, the vast majority of connected systems today are deployed at the edge of the network, near the end user or end application, opening... » read more

Looking Forward To The New Chip Cycle


Charles Shi, Principal and Senior Analyst at Needham & Company, LLC., remains upbeat about the EDA, IP and services business, or what SEMI refers to as the electronic system design (ESD) ecosystem. I recently spoke with Shi about his talk “Looking Forward to the New Chip Cycle” during the opening of the 2023 Design Automation Conference, collocated in July with SEMICON West in San Fra... » read more

New Plasma Power Technologies For Next-Gen Semiconductor Manufacturing


As chip designs push the limits of speed, size and complexity, the semiconductor industry has set its sights on angstrom-scale device features. High-speed, precise and repeatable plasma power delivery with sophisticated controls is fundamental to process and device improvements. These factors support inflection points in technologies from chip-scale packaging through advanced front-end technolo... » read more

FLEX 2023 Takeaways: Flexible And Printed Electronics Move Into Electronics Manufacturing


By Gity Samadi and Paul Semenza The FLEX Conference, held again this year in conjunction with SEMICON West 2023, provided numerous examples of continued developments in flexible, printed, and flexible hybrid electronics technologies applied to sensing, robotics, communications, and other applications. At the same time, there is growing focus on applying various additive manufacturing equipme... » read more

Smarter Systems Through Heterogeneous Integration: Highlights From 3D & Systems Summit


It has taken decades of research and development and strong commitment to various industry programs, but the stars are finally aligning for 3D semiconductor systems. No one could have left the 3D & Systems Summit 2023 – held in late June in Dresden – with any doubt that heterogeneous integration, enabled by increasingly mature 3D packaging technologies, is becoming a key driver of the s... » read more

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