Missing Interposer Abstractions And Standards


The design and analysis of an SoC based on an interposer is not for the faint of heart today, but the industry is aware of the challenges and is attempting to solve them. Until that happens, however, it will be a technique that only large companies can deploy because they need to treat everything almost as if it were a single die. The construction of large systems uses techniques, such as ab... » read more

Product Lifecycle Management For Semiconductors


Product lifecycle management (PLM) and the semiconductor industry have always been separate, but pressure is growing to integrate them. Automotive, IIoT, medical, and other industries see that as the only way to manage many aspects of their business, and as it stands, semiconductors are a large black box in that methodology. The technology space is driven by a mix of top down and bottom-up p... » read more

Advanced Packaging Shifts Design Focus To System Level


Growing momentum for advanced packaging is shifting design from a die-centric focus toward integrated systems with multiple die, but it's also straining some EDA tools and methodologies and creating gaps in areas where none existed. These changes are causing churn in unexpected areas. For some chip companies, this has resulted in a slowdown in hiring of ASIC designers and an uptick in new jo... » read more

Gaps In The AI Debug Process


When an AI algorithm is deployed in the field and gives an unexpected result, it's often not clear whether that result is correct. So what happened? Was it wrong? And if so, what caused the error? These are often not simple questions to answer. Moreover, as with all verification problems, the only way to get to the root cause is to break the problem down into manageable pieces. The semico... » read more

China Accelerates Foundry, Power Semi Efforts


China has unveiled several initiatives to advance its domestic semiconductor industry, including a new and massive fab expansion campaign in the foundry, gallium-nitride (GaN), and silicon carbide (SiC) markets. The nation is making a big push into what it calls “third-generation semiconductors,” which is a misnomer. The term actually refers to two existing and common power semiconductor... » read more

End In Sight For Chip Shortages?


The current wave of semiconductor and IC packaging shortages is expected to extend well into 2022, but there are also signs that supply may finally catch up with demand. The same is true for manufacturing capacity, materials and equipment in both the semiconductor and packaging sectors. Nonetheless, after a period of shortages in all segments, the current school of thought is that chip suppl... » read more

The Race To Make Better Qubits


One of the big challenges in quantum computing is getting qubits to last long enough to do something useful with them. After decades of research, there now appears to be tangible progress. The challenge with any new semiconductor technology is to improve performance by one or more orders of magnitude without discarding a half-century of progress in other areas. Qubits based on silicon quantu... » read more

A Broad Look Inside Advanced Packaging


Choon Lee, chief technology officer of JCET, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the semiconductor market, Moore’s Law, chiplets, fan-out packaging, and manufacturing issues. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: Where are we in the semiconductor cycle right now? Lee: If you look at 2020, it was around 10% growth in the overall semiconductor industry. ... » read more

Zonal Architectures Play Key Role In Vehicle Security


The automotive ecosystem is starting to shift toward zonal architectures, making vehicle functionality less dependent on the underlying hardware and allowing more flexibility in what gets processed where. The impact of that shift is both broad and significant. For carmakers, it could lead to hardware consolidation and more options for failovers in case something goes wrong with any system in... » read more

AI/ML Workloads Need Extra Security


The need for security is pervading all electronic systems. But given the growth in data-center machine-learning computing, which deals with extremely valuable data, some companies are paying particular attention to handling that data securely. All of the usual data-center security solutions must be brought to bear, but extra effort is needed to ensure that models and data sets are protected ... » read more

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