First Forays Into True 3D-IC Designs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss initial forays into 3D-ICs and what problems early adopters will encounter, with John Ferguson, senior director of product management at Siemens EDA; Mick Posner, senior product group director for chiplet at IP solutions in Cadence's Compute Solutions Group; Mo Faisal of Movellus; Chris Mueth, new opportunities business manager... » read more

The Future Of Verification


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of functional verification with Mohan Dhene, director for architecture and design at Alphawave Semi; Andy Nightingale, vice president for product management and marketing at Arteris; Dinesha Rao, senior group director for software engineering at Cadence; Chris Mueth, new opportunities business manager at Keysight; Gor... » read more

Mitigating Warpage In Multi-Chiplet Systems


Warpage of dies, redistribution layers, and interposers is a growing problem in multi-chiplet packages, and it can have a dramatic impact on the behavior and reliability of these devices. Multiple factors contribute to warpage, including larger chip sizes, severe thinning of the silicon substrate, temporary bonding and debonding processes, and scaling of bump pitch and size. Each of these ca... » read more

Precision Under Pressure: Managing Materials Complexity In Advanced Packaging


In the race to extend Moore's Law through advanced packaging, the limits of precision are no longer defined solely by lithography. Increasingly, they are dictated by the unpredictable behavior of materials. Semiconductor packaging today is no longer limited to just silicon and copper. It includes an expanding range of polymers, adhesives, dielectrics, exotic metals, along with substrates suc... » read more

Scaling Memory With Molybdenum


Molybdenum is looking increasingly promising as a replacement for a variety of metals commonly used in semiconductor manufacturing today, especially at leading-edge nodes. One by one, chipmakers are crossing metals off the list at advanced nodes. While ruthenium liners are nearly ready for production, the metal is not ready to replace copper in highly scaled interconnects. Ruthenium is very ... » read more

Glass Substrates Gain Momentum


As a package substrate, the benefits of glass are substantial. It's extremely flat with lower thermal expansion than organic substrates, which simplifies lithography. And that's just for starters. Warpage, a growing problem for multichip packages, is greatly reduced. Chips can be hybrid bonded to redistribution layer pads on glass. And relative to organic-core substrates, glass provides very... » read more

New Demands For IP Reuse


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the state of functional verification with Mohan Dhene, director for architecture and design at Alphawave Semi; Andy Nightingale, vice president for product management and marketing at Arteris; Dinesha Rao, senior group director for software engineering at Cadence; Chris Mueth, new opportunities business manager at Keysight;... » read more

New Antennas And Advanced ICs Needed For 6G


6G is expected to bring data speeds that enable highly integrated and responsive technology in smartphones, homes, cities, and autonomous vehicles, but realizing that goal will require a lot more work. There will be many more antennas everywhere, embedded in infrastructure around town, in base stations, edge-devices, and everything in between. They will be sending and receiving many more sig... » read more

Balancing Workloads In AI Processor Designs


A growing number of AI processors are being designed around specific workloads rather than standardized benchmarks, optimizing performance and power efficiency, but often with enough flexibility to adapt to future changes. While the fundamentals of matrix multiplication and software optimization still apply, those alone are no longer sufficient. Designs need to address specific data types, w... » read more

Coloring Optical Signals For More Bandwidth In Data Centers


Copper cabling has been the workhorse for moving data inside of AI and HPC data centers, but fiber is nipping at its heels. Optics brings three possible bandwidth multipliers — wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), the use of different modes, and polarization. Each has a role in longer-distance optical links, but the tradeoffs are different in the data center. WDM appears poised to boost... » read more

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