category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Gearing Up For Next-Gen Power Semis
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

After years in R&D, several vendors are moving closer to shipping power semiconductors and other products based on next-generation wide-bandgap technologies. These devices leverage the properties of new materials, such as aluminum nitride, diamond, and gallium oxide, and they are also utilized in different structures, such as vertical gallium-nitride power devices. But while many of thes... » read more

System-In-Package Thrives In The Shadows
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

IC packaging continues to play a big role in the development of new electronic products, particularly with system-in-package (SiP), a successful approach that continues to gain momentum — but mostly under the radar because it adds a competitive edge. With a SiP, several chips and other components are integrated into a package, enabling it to function as an electronic system or sub-system. ... » read more

Nudging 2D semiconductors forward
By Katherine Derbyshire - 16 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 1

The buzz about 2D materials replacing silicon appears to be premature. While 2D semiconductors have emerged as potential successors, it's not clear when or even if that will happen. As Iuliana Radu, Imec's director of quantum and exploratory computing observed, the “end” of silicon has been predicted many times before. It is not clear when 2D semiconductors will need to be ready. In fac... » read more

Challenges With Chiplets And Packaging
By Mark LaPedus - 15 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IC packaging technology trends, chiplets, shortages and other topics with William Chen, a fellow at ASE; Michael Kelly, vice president of advanced packaging development and integration at Amkor; Richard Otte, president and CEO of Promex, the parent company of QP Technologies; Michael Liu, senior director of global technical marketing at JCET; and Th... » read more

Long-Haul Trucking With Fewer Drivers
By Ann Mutschler - 13 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 1

The trucking industry is betting heavily on increasing levels of autonomy and electrification to reduce the cost of moving goods and to overcome persistent problems. The economics of autonomous driving are compelling, not least of which is an almost perpetual shortage of qualified drivers. But there also are a number of technical hurdles to making this work. On top of the challenges facing t... » read more

Wrestling With Analog At 3nm
By Brian Bailey - 09 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

Analog engineers are facing big challenges at 3nm, forcing them to come up with creative solutions to a widening set of issues at each new process node. Still, these problems must be addressed, because no digital chip will work without at least some analog circuitry. As fabrication technologies shrink, digital logic improves in some combination of power, performance, and area. The process te... » read more

Tradeoffs Between Edge Vs. Cloud
By Brian Bailey - 09 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

Increasing amounts of processing are being done on the edge, but how the balance will change between what's computed in the cloud versus the edge remains unclear. The answer may depend as much on the value of data and other commercial reasons as on technical limitations. The pendulum has been swinging between doing all processing in the cloud to doing increasing amounts of processing at the ... » read more

Will Monolithic 3D DRAM Happen?
By Bryon Moyer - 09 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 1

As DRAM scaling slows, the industry will need to look for other ways to keep pushing for more and cheaper bits of memory. The most common way of escaping the limits of planar scaling is to add the third dimension to the architecture. There are two ways to accomplish that. One is in a package, which is already happening. The second is to sale the die into the Z axis, which which has been a to... » read more

New Memories Add New Faults
By Bryon Moyer - 07 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 1

New non-volatile memories (NVM) bring new opportunities for changing how we use memory in systems-on-chip (SoCs), but they also add new challenges for making sure they will work as expected. These new memory types – primarily MRAM and ReRAM – rely on unique physical phenomena for storing data. That means that new test sequences and fault models may be needed before they can be released t... » read more

Fabs Drive Deeper Into Machine Learning
By Anne Meixner - 07 Sep, 2021 - Comments: 0

Advanced machine learning is beginning to make inroads into yield enhancement methodology as fabs and equipment makers seek to identify defectivity patterns in wafer images with greater accuracy and speed. Each month a wafer fabrication factory produces tens of millions of wafer-level images from inspection, metrology, and test. Engineers must analyze that data to improve yield and to reject... » read more

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