Ethernet: The Highway For Automotive Electronics?


What happens when technology from the fast paced communication industry makes a move into the traditional automotive industry? Semiconductor marketers and even the automotive industry are talking about revolutionary changes inside and outside the vehicle. What kinds of changes? Ethernet and sensors. There’s a lot of excitement and enthusiasm over the prospect of cars with Ethernet networki... » read more

How Much Multipatterning?


The latest consensus among litho experts is that extreme ultraviolet (EUV) will appear in the market sometime in coming months in a commercially viable form. The only question is the degree of commercially viability, and what it will actually cost. While some debate lingers about whether EUV will ever get going, the general feeling is that enough progress has been made recently to make it work.... » read more

Has The IC Industry Hit A ‘Red Brick Wall’?


In the mid-1980s, the semiconductor industry was in a crisis. Chipmakers were looking for ways to break the magical one-micron barrier. Many thought X-ray lithography would be required to break the barrier, but as it turned out, traditional optical technology did the trick. And the industry marched on. Then, in 2000 or so, the IC industry was nearing the so-called “red brick wall,” which... » read more

Revolutionizing Biotechnology


By Joseph Jeong and Tony Chao The Old English alphabet is generally regarded to have been invented around the 5th century. Literacy, however, at that time was mostly a privilege enjoyed by the upper elite class in the Western world. This all changed with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press around 1450, when literacy became democratized and available to laypeople. The printing press r... » read more

Semicon West Preview: Packaging


By Paula Doe The evolving mobile device market means the packaging, assembly and test supply chain faces a growing range of alternative technologies vying for its investment dollar, everything from Google’s modular electronics with 3D printing, to more solutions for integrating varied chips in smaller packaged systems. One potentially disruptive change is the wider use of more open-source... » read more

The Largest Planet-Wide Business Opportunity….Ever


Last week was the official start of the largest planet-wide business opportunity for semiconductors…ever. The world’s largest economy has decided that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that will be regulated. Direct action has started. In a few years every new car will be a hybrid, renewable power generation will be the norm, and every new house will have solar panels. To my mind this has b... » read more

SEMICON West Preview


By Paula Doe The fast growing demand for bandwidth is driving telecomm and data center user interest in moving high speed optical connections closer and closer to the chips, as recent advances in packaging technology, from microbumping to bonding to wafer-level redistribution now help make it possible. Chip-to-chip and chip-to-board optical connections increasingly look like a viable soluti... » read more

New Materials Era In Advanced Interconnects


By Kavita Shah Growth in semiconductors today is driven primarily by mobile applications and this demand continues to increase with no slowdown in sight. Supporting this trend, chipmakers continue adding smaller and faster transistors to chips to maintain the pace of Moore’s Law, and as a consequence copper wiring is being drastically scaled and densities increased. Today advanced chips c... » read more

Drowning In Choices


There are at least half a dozen possible options for 28nm process technologies. There will be even more for the finFET generation. And that’s just the beginning of how complicated things will become over the next few years. There are multiple ways to test, seemingly infinite numbers of IP offerings—even from the same IP providers—and even more packaging options to put them together. Th... » read more

Is 450mm Dead In The Water?


At one time, Intel, TSMC and Samsung were aggressively beating the 450mm drum. Chipmakers wanted, if not demanded, 450mm pilot line fabs by 2016, with high-volume manufacturing 450mm plants slated by 2018. At least for those companies, 450mm made some sense. Moving to 450mm wafers would supposedly give chipmakers a 2.25x boost in wafer area and a 30% cost reduction over 300mm substrates. But... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →