48V Applications Drive Power IC Package Options

By Bill Schweber - 21 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 1

The manufacturing process and die get most of the attention, but the packaging plays an important part in enabling and limiting performance, manufacturability, particularly when it comes to reliability of power devices. Given the wide range of underlying semiconductor power-device technologies — “basic” silicon, wide-bandgap silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), power levels... » read more

Mobility And 5G Drive Adoption Of New Materials For Power Devices

By Serena Brischetto - 21 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

Electric mobility, renewable energy, and other technology innovations like IoT, 5G, smart manufacturing, and robotics all require reliability, efficiency, and compact power systems, fueling the adoption of silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) to support lower voltages in significantly smaller devices. But chip designers must overcome the technological and economical challenges of int... » read more

Stronger, Better Bonding In Advanced Packaging

By Katherine Derbyshire - 21 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 1

System-in-package integrators are moving toward copper-to-copper direct bonding between die as the bond pitch goes down, making the solder used to connect devices in a heterogenous package less practical. In thermocompression bonding, protruding copper bumps bond to pads on the underlying substrate. In hybrid bonding, copper pads are inlaid in a dielectric, reducing the risk of oxidation. ... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 20

By Jesse Allen - 20 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

Siemens EDA's Harry Foster takes a look at the amount of time IC and ASIC projects spend in verification, changes in the number of engineers on a project, and how engineers are spending their time. Synopsys' Stelios Diamantidis considers the importance of specialized accelerators for AI workloads as both cloud and edge push the PPA limits of current technologies. Cadence's Paul McLellan p... » read more

Hidden Costs In Faster, Low-Power AI Systems

By Ed Sperling - 20 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 1

Chipmakers are building orders of magnitude better performance and energy efficiency into smart devices, but to achieve those goals they also are making tradeoffs that will have far-reaching, long-lasting, and in some cases unknown impacts. Much of this activity is a direct result of pushing intelligence out to the edge, where it is needed to process, sort, and manage massive increases in da... » read more

A Triple-Deck CFET Structure With An Integrated SRAM Cell For The 2nm Technology Node And Beyond

By Coventor - 20 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

A novel triple-deck CFET structure is proposed for the first time as a candidate for area scaling. The proposed triple-deck CFET aggressively stacks a pass gate over an inverter to form a half SRAM bit cell. The integration flow and full metal connectivity have been carefully designed for functionality and array assembly. Most of the pitch used in the process is around 40nm, which is patternabl... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 19

By Mark LaPedus - 19 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

X-ray imaging with AI The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory has demonstrated the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate the process of reconstructing images from coherent X-ray scattering data. Argonne’s technology, called PtychoNN, combines an X-ray imaging technique called ptychography with a neural network. This in turn enables researchers to decode X... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 19

By Jesse Allen - 19 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

Electronic skin for health tracking Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder developed a stretchy electronic 'skin' that can perform the tasks of wearable fitness devices such as tracking body temperature, heart rate, and movement patterns. "Smart watches are functionally nice, but they're always a big chunk of metal on a band," said Wei Zhang, a professor in the Department of Chem... » read more

Von Neumann Is Struggling

By Brian Bailey - 18 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 5

In an era dominated by machine learning, the von Neumann architecture is struggling to stay relevant. The world has changed from being control-centric to one that is data-centric, pushing processor architectures to evolve. Venture money is flooding into domain-specific architectures (DSA), but traditional processors also are evolving. For many markets, they continue to provide an effective s... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

By Mark LaPedus - 15 Jan, 2021 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers and OEMs Intel has appointed Pat Gelsinger as its new chief executive, effective Feb. 15. Gelsinger will also join Intel’s board upon assuming the role. He will succeed Bob Swan, who will remain CEO until Feb. 15. Most recently, Gelsinger served as the CEO of VMware since 2012. He also spent 30 years at Intel, becoming the company’s first chief technology officer. The move fo... » read more

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