Can Chiplets Serve Cost-Conscious Apps?


Chiplets are emerging as a significant new phase in the evolution of the semiconductor market, providing a way to continue scaling performance well beyond the size limitations of a reticle. But that improvement comes with a high price tag and a lot more complexity, which so far has limited adoption. One of the main reasons for the cost increase is the need for advanced packaging when employi... » read more

Packaging With Fewer People And Better Results


Advanced packaging has evolved far beyond the simple stacking of dies and connecting of interposers. Once a passive conduit between silicon and the outside world, it has become an active component of overall device performance. In today’s multi-die assemblies, the assembly and packaging lines are expected to maintain signal integrity at multi-gigahertz frequencies, manage heat in verticall... » read more

Benefits And Challenges In Multi-Die Assemblies


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chiplets, hybrid bonding, and new materials with Michael Kelly, vice president of Chiplets and FCBGA Integration at Amkor; William Chen, fellow at ASE; Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries; and Sander Roosendaal, R&D director at Synopsys Photonics Solutions. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. To view part one of t... » read more

What Exactly Are Chiplets And Heterogeneous Integration?


The terms “chiplet” and “heterogeneous integration” fill news pages, conference papers, and marketing presentations, and for the most part engineers understand what they're reading. But speakers sometimes stumble during a presentation trying to figure out whether a particular die qualifies as a chiplet, and heterogeneous integration comes in different guises for different people. Both t... » read more

Many Options For EUV Photoresists, No Clear Winner


In EUV lithography, and especially high-numerical-aperture EUV, balancing tradeoffs between resolution, sensitivity and line-width roughness is becoming increasingly difficult. Lithography patterning using extreme UV exposure depends on a resist mask that can simultaneously meet targets of small feature resolution, high sensitivity to EUV wavelength, and acceptable linewidth roughness. Unfor... » read more

Challenges Grow For Medical ICs


Demand for medical ICs used inside and outside the body is growing rapidly, but unique manufacturing and functional requirements coupled with low volumes have turned this into a complex and extremely challenging market. Few semiconductor applications demand this level of precision, reliability, and long-term stability. Unlike consumer electronics, where failure might mean a reboot or chip re... » read more

Linear Pluggable Optics Save Energy In Data Centers


Linear pluggable optics (LPO) is garnering more attention as a way to quickly and efficiently move data in and out of server racks, but a lack of standards for connecting the optical modules is slowing adoption at a time when there is growing pressure to reduce power in data centers. LPO is the newest of two approaches to solving the power wall problem in data centers. Co-packaged optics (CP... » read more

Interconnects Approach Tipping Point


As leading devices move to next generation nanosheets for logic, their interconnections are getting squeezed past the point where they can deliver low resistance pathways. The 1nm (10Å) node will have 20nm pitch and larger metal lines, but the interconnect stack already consumes a third of device power and accounts for 75% of the chip's RC delay. Changing this dynamic requires a superior co... » read more

Memory Wall Problem Grows With LLMs


The growing imbalance between the amount of data that needs to be processed to train large language models (LLMs) and the inability to move that data back and forth fast enough between memories and processors has set off a massive global search for a better and more energy- and cost-efficient solution. Much of this is evident in the numbers. The GPU market is forecast to reach $190 billion in ... » read more

What’s Next In Advanced Packaging?


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 3D-IC progress and issues, photonics, and tradeoffs with different interposers and bridge technologies, with Michael Kelly, vice president of Chiplets and FCBGA Integration at Amkor; William Chen, fellow at ASE; Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries; and Sander Roosendaal, R&D director at Synopsys Photonics Solutions. What fo... » read more

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