Verification Fails To Keep Up


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

Physical Access Control Raises New Security Concerns


Experts At The Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss hardware security challenges, including fundamental security of GenAI, with Nicole Fern, principal security analyst at Keysight; Serge Leef, AI-For-Silicon strategist at Microsoft; Scott Best, senior director for silicon security products at Rambus; Lee Harrison, director of Tessent Automotive IC Solutions at Siemens EDA; Mohit... » read more

How Semiconductor Fabs Use Water


Water — lots of it — is a critical enabler for advanced chip architectures, lithography, and back-end packaging. It feeds the ultra-pure water loops that touch every wafer, sluicing heat out of tools that run hotter at each node, and carrying spent chemistries to treatment. The natural reaction to reports that fabs “use millions of gallons of water” is concern, but the engineering re... » read more

Manufacturing At The Limits


Hybrid bonding has been in production for several years, with mature flows capable of delivering robust yields using 10µm interconnects. At that scale, processes can tolerate hundreds of nanometers of overlay variation, modest differences in wafer bow, and particle sizes rivaling the interconnect height without catastrophic impact. Hybrid bonding is compatible with optical metrology, existing ... » read more

Reticle Stitching Bumps Up Silicon Interposer Costs


Advanced packaging often relies on silicon interposers to connect chiplets and other components inside a package. The problem is that interposers typically exceed the reticle limit, which adds both complexity and cost. An interposer is essential for 2.5D and 3.5D architectures. As device scaling runs out of steam, chipmakers are decomposing planar SoCs into chiplets and connecting them throu... » read more

The End Of Copper Interconnects?


After nearly three decades, the era of copper interconnects may be coming to an end. Sort of. At interconnect CDs below 10nm, copper is no longer the best metallization choice. Yet it remains unsurpassed for larger features. The most serious challenge to continued copper scaling is the metal’s dramatic increase in resistivity at dimensions below its relatively large (40nm) mean free path l... » read more

Best Options For Using AI In Chip Design


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how and where AI can be applied to chip design to maximize its value, and how that will impact the design process, with Chuck Alpert, Cadence Fellow; Sathish Balasubramanian, head of product marketing and senior director for custom IC at Siemens EDA; Anand Thiruvengadam, senior director and head of AI product management at S... » read more

Complex Mix Of Processors At The Edge


With AI changing so fast, it’s a juggle for companies to ensure they can deliver the best performance now while also future-proofing for unknown AI models or a completely different approach to training and inference that may emerge. There are a slew of options for high-end and budget phones, hyperscalers, and low-cost, low-power edge devices, and while GPUs keep making headlines, many designe... » read more

Re-Architecting AI For Power


The industry is becoming increasingly concerned about the amount of power being consumed by AI, but there is no simple solution to the problem. It requires a deep understanding of the application, the software and hardware architectures at both the semiconductor and system levels, and how all of this is designed and implemented. Each piece plays a role in the total power consumed and the utilit... » read more

Reliable Training Data Paramount To AI Model Success


AI systems are increasingly being integrated into safety- and mission-critical applications ranging from automotive to health care and industrial IoT, stepping up the need for training data that is reliable, secure, and which is generated from trusted sources. AI activity is growing exponentially, as everybody tries to figure out how to apply it to their domain, application, or workload. In ... » read more

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