Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Intel aims to quadruple capacity for its most advanced chip packaging services by 2025, including with a new facility in Malaysia, per Nikkei Asia. Huawei is building a collection of secret semiconductor fabrication facilities across China to let the company skirt U.S. sanctions, SIA warned in a presentation seen by Bloomberg. It’s acquired at least two existing plants and is building at l... » read more

Using Data More Effectively In Chip Manufacturing


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss smart manufacturing and how tools and AI can enable it for semiconductors, with Mujtaba Hamid, general manager for product management for secure cloud environments at Microsoft; Vijaykishan Narayanan, vice president and general manager of India engineering and operations at proteanTecs; KT Moore, vice president of corporate ma... » read more

High-NA EUV Progress And Problems


High-NA EUV will enable logic scaling for at least the next couple process nodes. It’s complex, expensive, and a feat of optical engineering, but there are a lot of components with mixed progress. Harry Levinson, principal lithographer at HJL Lithography, talks  about when this technology will likely show up, what problems still need to be resolved, and what comes next. Related Readin... » read more

Power Semis Usher In The Silicon Carbide Era


Silicon carbide production is ramping quickly, driven by end market demand in automotive and price parity with silicon. Many thousands of power semiconductor modules already are in use in electric vehicles for on-board charging, traction inversion, and DC-to-DC conversion. Today, most of those are fabricated using silicon-based IGBTs. A shift to silicon carbide-based MOSFETs doubles the powe... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Intel dropped out of a $5.4 billion deal to purchase Tower Semiconductor in Israel. Intel cited the inability to obtain regulatory approval in a timely manner as the reason for ending the deal signed in February. Intel will pay a $353 million termination fee to Tower. The silicon wafer supply has moved back into positive territory for 2023 thanks to a 7% decline in wafer shipments combined w... » read more

Directed Self-Assembly Finds Its Footing


Ten years ago, when the industry was struggling to deliver EUV lithography, directed self-assembly (DSA) roared to the forefront of research and development for virtually every manufacturer determined to extend the limits of 193i. It was the hot topic at of the 2012 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, with one attendee from Applied Materials comparing its potential to disrupt the industry to ... » read more

Securing Chip Manufacturing Against Growing Cyber Threats


Semiconductor manufacturers are wrestling with how to secure a highly specialized and diverse global supply chain, particularly as the value of their IP and their dependence upon software increases — along with the sophistication and resources of the attackers. Where methodologies and standards do exist for security, they often are confusing, cumbersome, and incomplete. There are plenty of... » read more

3D In-Memory Compute Making Progress


Indium compounds are showing great promise for 3D in-memory compute and RF integration, but more work is needed. Researchers continue to make headway into 3D device integration particularly with indium tin oxide (ITO), which is widely used in display manufacturing. Recent work indicates that different compounds of indium oxide doped with tin, gallium, or zinc combinations may boost transisto... » read more

Enabling A Chiplet Supply Chain


Chiplets have been in the news quite a bit lately. A chiplet-based architecture offers several advantages that chip designers can benefit from as they bring out new products to the market. Over the years, system designers have integrated more and more functions into a system on chip (SoC). As a result, the size of SoCs keeps increasing. Even though SoCs provide several advantages in performance... » read more

FLEX 2023 Takeaways: Flexible And Printed Electronics Move Into Electronics Manufacturing


By Gity Samadi and Paul Semenza The FLEX Conference, held again this year in conjunction with SEMICON West 2023, provided numerous examples of continued developments in flexible, printed, and flexible hybrid electronics technologies applied to sensing, robotics, communications, and other applications. At the same time, there is growing focus on applying various additive manufacturing equipme... » read more

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