The State Of The EDA Industry In 2024


In what has become a yearly custom, I recently spoke to Jay Vleeschhouwer, Managing Director of Griffin Securities, for an update on his view of the state of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. My inquiries were based on his presentation at the 2024 Design Automation Conference (DAC). With his long background as an informed EDA industry follower, I knew it would be an enlightening ... » read more

One Chip Vs. Many Chiplets


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing list of challenges at advanced nodes and in advanced packages, with Jamie Schaeffer, vice president of product management at GlobalFoundries; Dechao Guo, director of advanced logic technology R&D at IBM; Dave Thompson, vice president at Intel; Mustafa Badaroglu, principal engineer at Qualcomm; and Thomas Ponnusw... » read more

Asia Government Funding Surges


Billions of dollars have been pouring into Asian countries for the past few years in an effort to boost their production capacity, explore leading-edge technology, compete on the global stage, and shore up supply chains in the face of geopolitical turmoil. Each country has its own plan to maintain a foothold in the global market, from China’s Big Fund to Korea’s Yongin Cluster and Japan�... » read more

EMEA Investments Driving Technology Specialization


Government programs across Europe and the UK are seeing a surge of investments in leading edge technology, materials, and packaging. Industry and academia are coalescing around specialty areas, drawing on established relationships to foster innovation and fill gaps in regional supply chains while also maintaining international bonds. Government initiatives also are picking up in Israel, Saudi A... » read more

2D Semiconductors Make Progress, But So Does Silicon


Semiconductor industry researchers have been anticipating the need for better transistor channel materials to replace silicon for a long time, but silicon devices have continued to improve enough to postpone that change. Silicon continues to provide an unmatched combination of device performance, manufacturability, and cost effectiveness. In recent years, though, the “end of silicon” cha... » read more

Hybrid Bonding Makes Strides Toward Manufacturability


Hybrid bonding is gaining traction in advanced packaging because it offers the shortest vertical connection between dies of similar or different functionalities, as well as better thermal, electrical and reliability results. Advantages include interconnect scaling to submicron pitches, high bandwidth, enhanced power efficiency, and better scaling relative to solder ball connections. But whil... » read more

Tuning Design And Process For High-NA EUV Stitching


By Kevin Lucas and James Ban Upcoming 14A and 10A process nodes will use high-NA EUV anamorphic scanners, which will require two stitched half-fields to achieve the equivalent wafer exposure area of previous-generation scanners, see figure 1. The lithography patterning at a stitching boundary between two mask exposures will be affected by additional process variation than are encountered in ... » read more

Metal-Oxide-Metal Capacitor Simulation And Modeling By Virtual Fabrication


Metal-Oxide-Metal (MOM) capacitors are passive radio frequency (RF) capacitive devices that are a common component in semiconductor logic chips [1]. A SPICE model of a MOM capacitor is typically used by designers during the design and performance evaluation of logic chip RF circuitry. Traditionally, it may take at least 3 months from the completion of the design layout, wafer fabrication, final... » read more

Advanced Packaging Driving New Collaboration Across Supply Chain


The semiconductor industry is undergoing a profound shift in packaging technologies to ones that rely on close collaboration among multiple stakeholders to solve intricate, multi-faceted, and extraordinarily complex problems. At the heart of this change is the convergence of heterogeneous integration, chiplets, and 3D stacking. Heterogeneous approaches allow companies to combine different te... » read more

Luminary Panel Sees Multi-Beam Mask Writers And Curvilinear Masks Key To 193i And EUV


Attendance was up and the mood was optimistic at this year’s SPIE Photomask and EUV conference held September 29 through October 3, 2024. The optimism was apparent as well for multi-beam mask writers and curvilinear masks during the eBeam Initiative’s 15th annual reception and meeting held on October 1. In the eBeam Initiative’s annual Luminaries survey, 93% of those surveyed said that pu... » read more

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