Hardware Security Set To Grow Quickly


Experts At The Table: The hardware security ecosystem is young and relatively small but could see a major boom in the coming years. As companies begin to acknowledge how vulnerable their hardware is, industry standards are being set, but must leave room for engineers to experiment. As part of an effort to determine the best way forward, Semiconductor Engineering sat down with a panel of experts... » read more

3.5D: The Great Compromise


The semiconductor industry is converging on 3.5D as the next best option in advanced packaging, a hybrid approach that includes stacking logic chiplets and bonding them separately to a substrate shared by other components. This assembly model satisfies the need for big increases in performance while sidestepping some of the thorniest issues in heterogeneous integration. It establishes a midd... » read more

Increasing Roles For Robotics In Fabs


Different types of robots with greater precision and mobility are beginning to be deployed in semiconductor manufacturing, where they are proving both reliable and cost-efficient. Static robots have been used for years inside of fabs, but they now are being supplemented by collaborative robots (cobots), autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), and autonomous humanoid robots to meet growing and widen... » read more

Building Smarter, Better Fabs


Battling labor shortages, faster ramp rates, and data overload, the process of designing and building greenfield fabs requires a combination of tech tools, failing earlier approaches and superior planning from day one. The complexity and scale of semiconductor fabs is skyrocketing as is the capital cost. Chipmakers are looking to ramp multibillion dollar fabs faster despite the hurdles of la... » read more

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving


High-volume products get more than their fair share of attention in the semiconductor world, but most chips don't fit into that category. While a few huge fabs and offshore assembly and test (OSAT) houses process enormous volumes of chips, small fabs and packaging lines serve for lower volumes, specialized technology, and prototyping. “There are companies that run literally one lot of 25 w... » read more

Reasons To Know IGZO


Interest in monolithic 3D integration is driven by both compute-in-memory applications and a more general need for increased circuit density. Compute-in-memory architectures seek to reduce the power requirements of machine learning workloads, which are dominated by the movement of data between memory and logic components. Even in conventional architectures, though, placing high-density, high-ba... » read more

Reusable Power Models


Power is not a new concern, and proprietary models are available for some tasks, but the industry lacks standardization. The Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) is hoping to help resolve that with an upcoming release of IEEE 2416, based on its Unified Power Model (UPM) work. The creation of any model is not to be taken lightly. There is a cost to its creation, verification and maintenance. ... » read more

CPU Performance Bottlenecks Limit Parallel Processing Speedups


Multi-core processors theoretically can run many threads of code in parallel, but some categories of operation currently bog down attempts to raise overall performance by parallelizing computing. Is it time to have accelerators for running highly parallel code? Standard processors have many CPUs, so it follows that cache coherency and synchronization can involve thousands of cycles of low-le... » read more

Analog Consolidation Spurs New Round Of Startups


A new wave of startups is rising to meet the growing need for specialized analog customization in chip design projects, opening the door to more affordable custom designs. These startups are breathing new life into a sector, which as a result of consolidation has favored only the largest chipmakers. As larger analog companies acquire smaller ones, many companies that were previously engaged ... » read more

Power Delivery Challenged By Data Center Architectures


Processor and data center architectures are changing in response to the higher voltage needs of servers running AI and large language models (LLMs). At one time, servers drew a few hundred watts for operation. But over the past few decades that has changed drastically due to a massive increase in the amount of data that needs to be processed and user demands to do it more quickly. NVIDIA's G... » read more

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