Author's Latest Posts


Siemens-Mentor Deal Retrospective


Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the acquisition of Mentor Graphics, the shift toward more customized design, and where AI fits into the design picture. SE: How does a company like Siemens see the EDA industry evolving? Hemmelgarn: Part of the reason we bought Mentor Grap... » read more

Advanced Packaging Options Increase


Designing, integrating and assembling heterogeneous packages from blocks developed at any process node or cost point is proving to be far more difficult than expected, particularly where high performance is one of the main criteria. At least part of the problem is there is a spectrum of choices, which makes it hard to achieve economies of scale. Even where there is momentum for a particular ... » read more

Why Scaling Must Continue


The entire semiconductor industry has come to the realization that the economics of scaling logic are gone. By any metric—price per transistor, price per watt, price per unit area of silicon—the economics are no longer in the plus column. So why continue? The answer is more complicated than it first appears. This isn't just about inertia and continuing to miniaturize what was proven in t... » read more

Manufacturing Printed Sensors


Vijaya Kayastha, lead device development engineer at Brewer Sciences, talks about the different approaches for different printed sensors, why each of those requires different skill levels for scaling up the process, and why this technology will be so important for industrial and IoT applications. » read more

Speed Returns As The Key Metric


For the foreseeable future, it's all about performance. For the past decade or so, power and battery life have been the defining characteristics of chip design. Performance was second to those. This was particularly important in smart phones and wearable devices, where time between charges was a key selling point. In fact, power-hungry processors killed the first round of smart watches. But ... » read more

In-Memory Computing


Gideon Intrater, CTO at Adesto Technologies, talks about why in-memory computing is now being taken seriously again, years after it was first proposed as a possible option. What's changed is an explosion in data, and a recognition that it's too time- and energy-intensive to send all of that data back and forth between memories and processors on the same chip, let alone to the cloud and back. On... » read more

Process Window Optimization


David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research, examines increasing process variation and interactions between various types of variation, why different approaches are necessary to improve yield and continue scaling. » read more

The Great Test Blur


As chip design and manufacturing shift left and right, concerns over reliability are suddenly front and center. But figuring out what exactly what causes a chip to malfunction, or at least not meet specs for performance and power, is getting much more difficult. There are several converging trends here, each of which plays an integral role in improving reliability. But how significant a role... » read more

More Semiconductor Data Moving To Cloud


The cloud is booming. After years of steady growth it has begun to spike, creating new options for design, test, analytics and AI, all of which have an impact on every segment of the semiconductor industry. The initial idea behind the cloud is that it would supplement processing done on premises, adding extra processing power wherever necessary, such as in the verification and debug stages o... » read more

Using Better Data To Shorten Test Time


The combination of machine learning plus more sensors embedded into IC manufacturing equipment is creating new possibilities for more targeted testing and faster throughput for fabs and OSATs. The goal is to improve quality and reduce the cost of manufacturing complex chips, where time spent in manufacturing is ballooning at the most advanced nodes. As the number of transistors on a die incr... » read more

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