Big Changes Ahead For Chip Technology And Industry Dynamics


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of customization and advanced packaging, and concerns about reliability and geopolitical rivalries with Martin van den Brink, president and CTO of ASML; Luc Van den Hove, CEO of imec; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; and Ankur Gupta, vice president and general manager of the test group and lifecycle s... » read more

Hunting For Hardware-Related Errors In Data Centers


The semiconductor industry is urgently pursuing design, monitoring, and testing strategies to help identify and eliminate hardware defects that can cause catastrophic errors. Corrupt execution errors, also known as silent data errors, cannot be fully isolated at test — even with system-level testing — because they occur only under specific conditions. To sort out the environmental condit... » read more

Bump Reliability is Challenged By Latent Defects


Thermal stress is a well-known problem in advanced packaging, along with the challenges of mechanical stress. Both are exacerbated by heterogenous integration, which often requires mingling materials with incompatible coefficients of thermal expansion (CTE). Effects are already showing up and will likely only get worse as package densities increase beyond 1,000 bumps per chip. “You comb... » read more

Ramping Up IC Predictive Maintenance


The chip industry is starting to add technology that can predict impending failures early enough to stave off serious problems, both in manufacturing and in the field. Engineers increasingly are employing in-circuit monitors embedded in SoC designs to catch device failures earlier in the production flow. But for ICs in the field, data tracing from design to application use only recently has ... » read more

Chip Industry’s Earnings Roundup


Editor's Note: Updated throughout February 2023 for additional earnings releases. Many companies reported revenue growth in the most recent quarter, but the latest round of chip industry earnings releases reflected some major themes: Demand for consumer electronics softened due to inflation, rising interest rates, and post-pandemic market saturation, creating a slump in the memory chip ... » read more

Building Better Cars Faster


Carmakers are accelerating their chip and electronic design schedules to remain competitive in an increasingly fast-changing market, but they are encountering gaps in the tooling, the supply chain, and in the methodologies they use to create those cars. While it's easy to envision how CAD software could be used to create the next new vehicle’s 3-D look, and how simulation software helps de... » read more

Solving Problems With The IoT


The Internet of Things, a term once applied to almost any "smart" gadget connected to the Internet, is becoming more useful, more complex, and more of a security risk as the value of data continues to grow and more people depend on IoT technology. In the decades since the concept was first introduced, IoT devices have become so ubiquitous that applications cover practically every consumer, c... » read more

Where And Why AI Makes Sense In Cars


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about where AI makes sense in automotive and what are the main challenges, with Geoff Tate, CEO of Flex Logix; Veerbhan Kheterpal, CEO of Quadric; Steve Teig, CEO of Perceive; and Kurt Busch, CEO of Syntiant. What follows are excerpts of that conversation, which were held in front of a live audience at DesignCon. Part two of this... » read more

Startup Funding: January 2023


Quantum computing had a good month in January, collectively raising over $240 million. A significant chunk of that went to a full-stack quantum company whose processers use neutral atoms manipulated by optical tweezers. Other companies funded this month are developing trapped ion processors, photonics-based processors, and quantum memories, which will be essential for quantum networking. Two co... » read more

Chip Industry Startup Funding Annual Report & Analysis: 2022


Introduction New ideas fuel the semiconductor industry, and money enables those ideas. Tracking what startups get funded is one way to see which ideas are more viable and which problems need to be solved most urgently. In general, the more startups working on a solution to a particular problem, the greater the need for a viable solution — and the more likely one will be developed. Investo... » read more

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