Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Imec released its semiconductor roadmap, which calls for doubling compute power every six months to handle the data explosion and new data-intensive problems. Imec named five walls (scaling, memory, power, sustainability, cost) that need to be dismantled. The roadmap (below) stretches from 7nm to 0.2nm (2 angstroms) by 2036, and includes four generations of gate-all-around FETs followed by thre... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Starting in 2025, SEMICON West will move to Phoenix for a five-year annual rotation. And in 2024, it will shift dates from July to October. This year’s conference will still take place July 11 to 13 at the Moscone Center. Phoenix will first host SEMICON West on October 7-9, 2025. Thereafter, it will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on the alternating years and over the long term... » read more

Collaboration Widens Among Big Chip Companies


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing need for collaboration among equipment and tools vendors, the impact of systems companies and increases in complexity, and how to handle a push for more customization while controlling costs, with Martin van den Brink, president and CTO of ASML; Luc Van den Hove, CEO of imec; David Fried, vice president of computati... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Dutch tech industry group FME called for the European Commission to draft a position on whether and how to restrict computer chip technology exports to China, saying "more unified and powerful action" was needed from Europe, according to Reuters. Meanwhile, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said he saw gradual progress in talks with the U.S. over potential new restrictions on exporting chip-makin... » read more

Ferroelectric Memories: The Middle Ground


The first article in this series considered the use of ferroelectrics to improve subthreshold swing behavior in logic transistors. The prospects for ferroelectrics in logic applications are uncertain, but ferroelectric memories have clear advantages. The two most common commercial memories lie at opposite ends of a spectrum. DRAM is fast, but requires constant power to maintain its informat... » read more

An OSAT Perspective On Semiconductor Market Trends


For the semiconductor industry, 2022 was a very interesting year. On one hand, it witnessed shortages in the supply chain. On the other hand, the macro-economic situation turned and demand for several consumer and computing devices plummeted. A trade war with China and ensuing localization of supply chain with passage of CHIPS act took shape in 2022. The auto industry is still recovering from t... » read more

Unknowns And Challenges In Advanced Packaging


Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about unknowns in material properties, the impact on bonding, and why environmental factors are so important in complex heterogeneous packages. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Companies have been designing heterogeneous chips to take advantage of specific applications or use cases, but th... » read more

Supply Chain Collaboration Key To Making Chip Industry More Sustainable


Coming in the wake of the COP27, the Smart and Green Manufacturing Summit at SEMICON Europa 2022 (Munich, 15-17 November) had a timely focus on the semiconductor industry’s contribution to meeting the United Nations’ target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. However, in an industry as large and valuable as semiconductors, social as well as environmental imp... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects


Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

DeepGBASS: Deep Guided Boundary-Aware Semantic Segmentation


Image semantic segmentation is ubiquitously used in scene understanding applications, such as AI Camera, which require high accuracy and efficiency. Deep learning has significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in semantic segmentation. However, many of recent semantic segmentation works only consider class accuracy and ignore the accuracies at the boundaries between semantic classes. To improv... » read more

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