Chip Industry Week In Review


TSMC is expected to reduce its Fab 14 mature-node capacity by 15% to 20% to free up resources for its advanced packaging technologies, reports Counterpoint. The foundry will likely rely on its VIS affiliate site in Singapore (operational in late 2026) and other overseas fabs to ensure continued supply for older nodes. Memory The U.S. threatened 100% tariffs on South Korean memory compan... » read more

Every Atom Now Counts In Advanced Chip Manufacturing


Artificial-intelligence workloads are pushing semiconductor design to a point where traditional scaling strategies are running out of room. Performance improvements that once came from shrinking transistors now depend increasingly on how devices are stacked, interconnected, and isolated. Transistor scaling still matters, but advanced device architectures no longer can accommodate the power dens... » read more

An Explosion In Interconnect Complexity


For decades, electronics offered two levels of routing structure to manage signals that originate or terminate in an integrated circuit. Recently, that number has risen to five, and while it adds far more flexibility for structuring electronic equipment, it also brings greater complexity and ratchets up the number of design decisions needed to complete a project. This transition has been evo... » read more

Oxides Bring Low Leakage Transistors To Leading-Edge Memories


AI workloads need to position more memory that uses less power in ever-closer proximity to computational logic. That overriding imperative is driving new memory designs and new materials exploration across a wide range of applications, including cache memory, working memory, as well as a new category, non-volatile memory used for direct computation. The largest of these, by volume, is workin... » read more

Ripple Effects: Why Water Risk Is The Next Major Business Challenge For The Semiconductor Industry


The semiconductor industry is the bedrock of modern technology, enabling everything from AI and cloud computing to electric vehicles. Yet, this critical sector is also one of the most resource-intensive globally, with a substantial dependency on water. A single fabrication plant can demand up to 10 million gallons of water daily, comparable to the consumption of a city with 300,000 residents.... » read more

A Novel Side-channel Attack That Utilizes Memory Re-orderings (U. of Washington, Duke, UCSC et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Memory DisOrder: Memory Re-orderings as a Timerless Side-channel" was published by researchers at University of Washington, Duke University, UC Santa Cruz, Raytheon and Microsoft Research. Abstract "To improve efficiency, nearly all parallel processing units (CPUs and GPUs) implement relaxed memory models in which memory operations may be re-ordered, i.e., ex... » read more

Scaling of 2D Semiconductor Nanoribbons for High Performance Transistors (Purdue, NUS et al.)


A new technical paper titled "Scaling of Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Nanoribbons for High-Performance Electronics" was published by researchers at Purdue University, National University of Singapore, Nexstrom Pte. Ltd and Dankook University. Abstract "Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide (TMD) field-effect transistors (FETs), with their atomically thin bodies, are promising candida... » read more

Co-optimization Approaches For Reliable and Efficient AI Acceleration (Peking University et al.)


A new technical paper titled "The Quest for Reliable AI Accelerators: Cross-Layer Evaluation and Design Optimization" was published by researchers at Peking University and Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Integrated Circuits. Abstract "As the CMOS technology pushes to the nanoscale, aging effects and process variations have become increasingly pronounced, posing significant reliabilit... » read more

Non-volatile Ferroelectric Silicon Photonics As A Scalable, Heat-free Platform For Energy-efficient Photonic Computing (UPV, iPronics et al.)


A new technical paper titled "High-Speed Non-Volatile Barium Titanate Field Programmable Photonic Gate Array" was published by researchers at Universitat Politècnica de València, iPronics Programmable Photonic, Lumiphase, University of West Attica and CEA-Leti. Abstract "Programmable integrated photonics aims to replicate the versatility of field-programmable gate arrays in the optical ... » read more

Addressing Critical Tradeoffs In NPU Design


Experts At The Table: AI/ML are driving a steep ramp in neural processing unit (NPU) design activity for everything from data centers to edge devices such as PCs and smartphones. Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Jason Lawley, director of product marketing, AI IP at Cadence; Sharad Chole, chief scientist and co-founder at Expedera; Steve Roddy, chief marketing officer at Quadric; Steven W... » read more

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