Karen Heyman

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Karen Heyman is a technology editor at Semiconductor Engineering.

Author's Latest Posts

New Standards Push Co-Packaged Optics
By Karen Heyman - 26 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

Co-packaged optics (CPOs) promise five times the bandwidth of pluggable connections, but the new architecture requires multiple changes to accommodate different applications. The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) recently published standards for co-packaged optics, which are the photonic industry’s hope for handling today’s faster Ethernet interfaces, as well as increasing speeds and p... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test
By Karen Heyman - 14 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he launched an effort to establish rules on artificial intelligence to address national security and education concerns, Reuters reported. "Time is of the essence to get ahead of this powerful new technology to prevent potentially wide-ranging damage to society and national security and instead put it to positive use by advancing strong, bipartisan... » read more

Transitioning To Photonics
By Karen Heyman - 13 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 1

Silicon photonics is undergoing a resurgence as traditional approaches for reducing power and heat become more difficult and expensive, opening the door to a whole new set of technological challenges and driving up demand for a skill set that is in short supply today. From a technology standpoint, photonics is extremely complex. Signals drift, they are modulated with heat, and structures lik... » read more

Challenges In Photonics Testing
By Karen Heyman - 11 Apr, 2023 - Comments: 0

Photonics is poised for significant growth due a rapid increase in data volumes and the need to move that data quickly and with minimal heat. But to reach its full potential photonics will have to overcome several production hurdles. The biggest challenge today involves alignment. While the industry is poised to produce billions of units, it still relies on testing practices that don't scale. ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Karen Heyman - 24 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

TEL announced plans to build a ¥2.2 billion ($168.2 million) production and logistics center at its Tohoku Office to increase capacity. Construction of the 57,000m² facility, which will be used for manufacturing thermal processing and single-wafer deposition systems, is slated to start in spring 2024, and expected to be completed in fall 2025. Toshiba's board voted in favor of a 2 trillio... » read more

Cooling The Data Center
By Karen Heyman - 15 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Since British mathematician and entrepreneur Clive Humby coined the rallying cry, “Data is the new oil,” some 20 years ago, it has been an upbeat phrase at data science conferences. But in engineering circles, that increasingly includes a daily grind of hardware challenges, and chief among them is how to cool the places where all that data is processed and stored. An estimated 65 zettaby... » read more

Standards: The Next Step For Silicon Photonics
By Karen Heyman - 07 Mar, 2023 - Comments: 0

Testing silicon photonics is becoming more critical and more complicated as the technology is used in new applications ranging from medicine to cryptography, lidar, and quantum computing, but how to do that in a way that is both consistent and predictable is still unresolved. For the past three decades, photonics largely has been an enabler for high-speed communications, a lucrative market t... » read more

Managing Thermal-Induced Stress In Chips
By Karen Heyman - 16 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

At advanced nodes and in the most advanced packages, physics is no one's friend. Escalating density, smaller features, and thinner dies make it more difficult to dissipate heat, and they increase mechanical stress. On the flip side, thinner dielectrics and tighter spaces make it more difficult to insulate and protect against that heat, and in conjunction with those smaller features and higher d... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test
By Karen Heyman - 10 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

Chips for consumer devices are down, but the overall chip industry is actively preparing for the next phase of growth. Worldwide silicon wafer shipments, which are an aggregate view of all the various semiconductor segments, hit an all-time high in 2022, increasing 4% to 14,713 million square inches (MSI). Wafer revenue, meanwhile, rose 9.5% to $13.8 billion over the same period, SEMI reported ... » read more

Disaggregating And Extending Operating Systems
By Karen Heyman - 09 Feb, 2023 - Comments: 0

The push toward disaggregation and customization in hardware is starting to be mirrored on the software side, where operating systems are becoming smaller and more targeted, supplemented with additional software that can be optimized for different functions. There are two main causes for this shift. The first is rising demand for highly optimized and increasingly heterogeneous designs, which... » read more

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