Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

By Mark LaPedus - 22 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers Apple has introduced its latest MacBook Pro notebooks built around the company’s new, in-house designed processors, dubbed the M1 Pro and M1 Max. The chips, to be incorporated in its 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro systems, are the most powerful devices developed by Apple. The CPUs in the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips deliver up to 70% faster performance than the first M1 device. Based ... » read more

Why Mask Blanks Are Critical

By Mark LaPedus - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 1

Geoff Akiki, president of Hoya LSI at the Hoya Group, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about optical and extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography as well as mask blanks. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: Mask blanks are components that serve as the base or the substrate for a photomask. Why are they critical? Akiki: If you look at Hoya, we've been positioned as... » read more

The New Technology Solutions For Advanced SiP Devices

By YongJai Seo - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

For many years, system-in-package (SiP) technology has been a focus for semiconductor packaging to address the ongoing market trend of system integration and size reduction. Today’s increased complexity and higher package density for SiP devices has driven the development of new packaging technologies. In response, compartmental shield technology makes it possible to put several functions int... » read more

Curvilinear Design Benefits For Wafers

By Jan Willis - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

Throughout this blog series the focus has been on curvilinear photomasks – the benefits, enablers, and challenges. It leads to the obvious question that Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S, put to the panel of luminaries. If leading-edge mask shops are ready for curvilinear shapes on mask enabled by curvilinear ILT, multi-beam mask writers and the mask design chain, can we have curvilinear target shapes... » read more

Evaluating The Impact Of STI Recess Profile Control On Advanced FinFET Performance

By Yu De Chen - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

Profile variation is one of the most important problems during semiconductor device manufacturing and scaling. These variations can degrade both chip yield and device performance. Virtual fabrication can be used to study profile variation in a very effective and economical manner and avoid process cycle time and wafer cost in the fab. In this short article, we will review the impact of STI (s... » read more

China’s IC Industry Revenue On Track to Top $250 Billion In 2025

By Kim Sin - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

In the short span of a decade, China’s semiconductor sector has exploded to become one of the largest in the world and match the region’s prominence as the biggest consumer of chips. From 2015 to 2020 alone, revenue of China’s integrated circuit (IC) industry – consisting of IC design, IC manufacturing, and packaging and test – expanded at a rapid clip of 20% CAGR (RMB) to $128 billio... » read more

Gearing Up For High-NA EUV

By Mark LaPedus - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 2

The semiconductor industry is moving full speed ahead to develop high-NA EUV, but bringing up this next generation lithography system and the associated infrastructure remains a monumental and expensive task. ASML has been developing its high-numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography line for some time. Basically, high-NA EUV scanners are the follow-on to today’s EUV lithography systems... » read more

A Look Inside The Apple iPhone 13 Pro

By Stacy Wegner - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

By Stacy Wegner, Daniel Yang, and Ziad Shukry We received the iPhone 13 and iPhone 13 Pro in our labs and identification and early costing analysis are available below. The phone models we are discussing today are the Apple iPhone 13 Pro, model A2636, 256GB and the Apple iPhone 13, model A2631 256GB. Apple iPhone 13 Pro cost analysis We have completed the QTT cost analysis and estimate ... » read more

Progress On General-Purpose Quantum Computers

By Katherine Derbyshire - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

The race is on to scale up quantum computing, transforming it from an esoteric research tool into a commercially viable, general-purpose machine. Special-purpose quantum computers have been available for several years now. Systems like D-Wave’s Advantage focus on specific classes of problems that are amenable to modeling as quantum systems. Still, the ultimate goal of having a general purp... » read more

Four Types Of Predictive Maintenance Technologies

By Jessica Albright - 21 Oct, 2021 - Comments: 0

Through the expansion of our Smart Devices and Printed Electronics Foundry, we have assisted a diverse range of customers to find the benefits of predictive maintenance to improve the efficiency of their production, the safety of their personnel, and the quality of their products. We have identified some of the most prevalent predictive maintenance technologies and some of the most common appl... » read more

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Entities, people and technologies explored

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by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

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