Backside Power Delivery Nears Production


Backside power delivery is being called a game changer — a breakthrough technology and the next great enabler in CMOS scaling. It promises significant PPA advances, including faster switching, lower voltage droop, and reduced power supply noise. And it is poised to deliver these benefits below the 2nm node, despite a substantial disruption in front-end processes from lithography pattern di... » read more

Advanced Packaging Fundamentals for Semiconductor Engineers


Advanced packaging is inevitable. Large systems companies and processing vendors already are working with various types of highly engineered packaging. The rest of the semiconductor industry will follow at some point, whether they're designing their own packages, developing the tools, processes, materials, and methodologies to create them, or developing components that will be used inside of th... » read more

Auto Sector Leads The Way In IC Security


Concerns about chip and system security are beginning to bear fruit in some markets, driven by the overlap in safety and security in automotive applications and the growing value of algorithms and complex systems in others. But how and when that security is implemented is still all over the map, and so is its effectiveness. The reasons are as nuanced as the designs themselves, which makes it... » read more

First-Time Silicon Success Plummets


First-time silicon success is falling sharply due to rising complexity, the need for more iterations as chipmakers shift from monolithic chips to multi-die assemblies, and an increasing amount of customization that makes design and verification more time-consuming. Details from a new functional verification survey[1] highlight the growing difficulty of developing advanced chips that are both... » read more

Big Changes Ahead For Interposers And Substrates


Interposers and substrates are undergoing a profound transformation from intermediaries to engineered platforms responsible for power distribution, thermal management, high-density interconnects, and signal integrity in the most advanced computing systems. This shift is being driven by AI, high-performance computing (HPC), and next-generation communications, where the need for heterogeneous ... » read more

The Rise Of Thin Wafer Processing


The shift from planar SoCs to 3D-ICs and advanced packages requires much thinner wafers in order to improve performance and reduce power, reducing the distance that signals need to travel and the amount of energy needed to drive them. Markets calling for ultrathin wafers are growing. The combined thickness of an HBM module with 12 DRAM dies and a base logic chip is still less than that of a ... » read more

New Data Center Protocols Tackle AI


Compute nodes in AI and HPC data centers increasingly need to reach out beyond the chip or package for additional resources to process growing workloads. They may commandeer other nodes in a rack (scale-up) or employ resources in other racks (scale-out). The problem is there currently is no open scale-up protocol. So far this task has been dominated by proprietary protocols, because much of ... » read more

Automakers Grapple With Fundamental Tech Changes


Automotive OEMs are wrestling with a stack of changes that affect every part of their business and technology, from threats of tariffs and shifting geopolitical alliances, to new vehicle architectures, tighter market windows, and a fundamental reordering of relationships and priorities between OEMs and their suppliers. There is no consistency to these developments or a best path to solving t... » read more

EUV’s Future Looks Even Brighter


The rapidly increasing demand for advanced-node chips to support everything-AI is putting pressure on the industry's ability to meet demand. The need for cutting-edge semiconductors is accelerating in applications ranging from hyperscale data centers powering large language models to edge AI in smartphones, IoT devices, and autonomous systems. But manufacturing those chips relies heavily on ... » read more

Silent Data Errors Still Slipping Through The Cracks


Silent data corruption errors in large server farms have become a major concern of cloud users, hyperscalers, processor manufacturers and the test community. Silent data errors (also called silent data corruption errors) are hardware errors that occur when an incorrect computational result from a processor core goes undetected by the system. The data is silently corrupted because neither sof... » read more

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