category: Editor’s Note

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Advanced Packaging Goes Mainstream
By Ed Sperling - 08 May, 2017 - Comments: 0

The roadmap for shrinking digital logic will continue for at least the next 10 years. For others devices, particularly analog, it will slow down or end. And therein lies one of the most fundamental changes in semiconductor design and manufacturing in the past half century. This is no longer just talk. Apple is using a fan-out architecture in its iPhone 7. Memory makers are stacking NAND and ... » read more

Time For New Rules
By Ed Sperling - 10 Apr, 2017 - Comments: 1

Is Moore's Law dead? Brigadier General Paul Fredenburgh, commandant of the Dwight D. Eisenhower School for National Security and Resource Strategy, asked that question to four industry CEOs last week while visiting Silicon Valley with some of his students. He received four highly nuanced, if not different, answers. Left to right: Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence; Wally Rhines, Mentor Graphics; Simon Se... » read more

Testing For Security
By Ed Sperling - 06 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

Ever since the IoT became a household name, people have been strategizing about ways to utilize non-secure devices to mount an attack. The first instances of using electricity to overload a device's circuits, thereby neutralizing existing security features, came to light in some of the earliest car hacking incidents. These are basically side-channel attacks using what amounts to an electroni... » read more

More Degrees Of Freedom
By Ed Sperling - 06 Feb, 2017 - Comments: 0

Ever since the publication of Gordon Moore's famous observation in 1965, the semiconductor industry has been laser-focused on shrinking devices to their practical, and more recently, impractical limit. Increasing transistor density has encountered a number of problems along the way, but it also has enabled us to put computers—which once filled specially built rooms—onto the desktop firs... » read more

Morphing Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 15 Dec, 2016 - Comments: 0

In 1965, Gordon Moore defined a timetable for doubling the number of transistors on a piece of silicon every two years. The law, as he originally defined it, is now hopelessly outdated. Any attempts to apply it to the most advanced chips today are a stretch at best, and complete fiction at worst. No one is on a two-year cadence between process nodes anymore—not even Intel. In fact, no one ... » read more

Advanced Packaging Requires Better Yield
By Ed Sperling - 17 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 1

Whether Moore's Laws truly ends, or whether the semiconductor industry reaches into the Angstrom world after 3nm—the semiconductor industry dislikes fractions—advanced packaging increasingly will dominate semiconductor designs. Apple already is on board with its iPhone 7, using TSMC's fan-out approach. And all of the major foundries and OSATs are lining up with a long list of capabilitie... » read more

Advanced Packaging Is Real. Now What?
By Ed Sperling - 14 Jan, 2016 - Comments: 0

For the past five years, it's been clear that 2.5D, fan-outs and other forms of system-in-package were on the horizon. Exactly when they would arrive no one knew. The most common prediction was that the timing would depend on when one of the big chipmakers decided to go down that route. The theory was that the remainder of the industry would follow, ecosystem issues would be sorted out—partic... » read more

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