category: Top Stories

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

What’s Next In Advanced Packaging
By Mark LaPedus - 20 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 3

Packaging houses are readying the next wave of advanced IC packages, hoping to gain a bigger foothold in the race to develop next-generation chip designs. At a recent event, ASE, Leti/STMicroelectronics, TSMC and others described some of their new and advanced IC packaging technologies, which involve various product categories, such as 2.5D, 3D and fan-out. Some new packaging technologies ar... » read more

Possible Uses Narrow For Negative Capacitance FETs
By Katherine Derbyshire - 20 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 1

The discovery of a ferroelectric phase in hafnium dioxide (HfO2) has sparked significant interest in opportunities for integration of ferroelectric transistors and memories with conventional CMOS devices. Demonstrations of “negative capacitance” behavior in particular suggest these devices might evade the 60 mV/decade limit on subthreshold swing, thereby improving transistor efficiency. ... » read more

Sidestepping Moore’s Law
By Mark LaPedus - 20 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 2

Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about advanced packaging, the challenges involved with the technology, and the implications for Moore’s Law. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are some of the big issues with IC packaging today? Cheung: Moore’s Law is slowing down, but transistor scaling will co... » read more

Wrestling With High-Speed SerDes
By Ann Mutschler - 19 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 2

SerDes has emerged as the primary solution in chips where there is a need for fast data movement and limited I/O, but this technology is becoming significantly more challenging to work with as speeds continue to rise to offset the massive increase in data. A Serializer/Deserializer is used to convert parallel data into serial data, allowing designers to speed up data communication without h... » read more

Power, Reliability And Security In Packaging
By Ed Sperling - 19 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsun... » read more

Circuit Aging Becoming A Critical Consideration
By Ann Mutschler - 17 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 5

Circuit aging was considered somebody else's problem when most designs were for chips in consumer applications, but not anymore. Much of this reflects a shift in markets. When most chips were designed for consumer electronics, such as smart phones, designs typically were replaced every couple of years. But with the mobile phone market flattening, and as chips increasingly are used in automot... » read more

Why Chips Are Getting Noisier
By Brian Bailey - 13 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 4

In the past, designers only had to worry about noise for sensitive analog portions of a design. Digital circuitry was immune. But while noise gets worse at newer process nodes, staying at 28nm does not mean that it can be ignored anymore. With Moore's Law slowing, designs have to do more with less. Margins are being squeezed, additional concurrency is added, and attempts are made to opti... » read more

Waiting For Chiplet Interfaces
By Brian Bailey - 13 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 0

There aren't many success stories related to chiplets today for a very simple reason—there are few standard interfaces defined for how to connect them. In fact, the only way to use them is to control both sides of the interface with a proprietary interface and protocol. The one exception is the definition of HBM2, which enables large quantities of third-party DRAM to be connected to a logi... » read more

HBM2 Vs. GDDR6: Tradeoffs In DRAM
By Ed Sperling - 13 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about new DRAM options and considerations with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management at Rambus; Marc Greenberg, group director for product marketing at Cadence; Graham Allan, senior product marketing manager for DDR PHYs at Synopsys; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory marketing at Samsung Electronics. What follows are excerpts of th... » read more

BiST Grows Up In Automotive
By Ann Mutschler - 12 Jun, 2019 - Comments: 0

Test concepts and methods that have been used for many years in traditional semiconductor and SoC design are now being leveraged for automotive chips, but they need to be adapted and upgraded to enable monitoring of advanced automotive systems during operation of a vehicle. Automotive and safety critical designs have very high quality, reliability, and safety requirements, which pairs pe... » read more

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