Survival Of The Cheapest?


We all want the best solution to win, but that rarely happens. History is littered with products that were superior to the alternatives and yet lost out to a lessor rival. I am sure several examples are going through your mind without me having to list them. It is normally the first to volume that wins, often accelerated by copious amounts of marketing dollar to help push it against headwinds. ... » read more

Driving With Chiplets


The first examples of the upper class of vehicles that can drive autonomously on the highway already have arrived on the market or will be introduced to the market in the coming years. Travel on the highway was selected as the first application because the number of objects that have to be taken into account in front of, next to, and behind the vehicle is manageable. This means the required ... » read more

The Race To Next-Gen 2.5D/3D Packages


Several companies are racing each other to develop a new class of 2.5D and 3D packages based on various next-generation interconnect technologies. Intel, TSMC and others are exploring or developing future packages based on one emerging interconnect scheme, called copper-to-copper hybrid bonding. This technology provides a way to stack advanced dies using copper connections at the chip level,... » read more

3D Power Delivery


Getting power into and around a chip is becoming a lot more difficult due to increasing power density, but 2.5D and 3D integration are pushing those problems to whole new levels. The problems may even be worse with new packaging approaches, such as chiplets, because they constrain how problems can be analyzed and solved. Add to that list issues around new fabrication technologies and an emph... » read more

The Race For Better Computational Software


Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about computational software, why it's so critical at the edge and in AI systems, and where the big changes are across the semiconductor industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: There is no consistent approach to how data will be processed at the edge, in part because there is no consis... » read more

New Technologies To Support 3D-ICs


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit of ANSYS; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Bus... » read more

EDA Gears Up For 3D


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for the Semiconductor Business Unit of ANSYS; John Park, product management director for IC packaging and cross-platform solutions at Cadence; John Ferguson, director of marketing for DRC applications at Mentor, a Siemens Bus... » read more

Advanced Packaging Options Increase


Designing, integrating and assembling heterogeneous packages from blocks developed at any process node or cost point is proving to be far more difficult than expected, particularly where high performance is one of the main criteria. At least part of the problem is there is a spectrum of choices, which makes it hard to achieve economies of scale. Even where there is momentum for a particular ... » read more

HBM2E: The E Stands for Evolutionary


Samsung introduced the first memory products in March that conform to JEDEC’s HBM2E specification, but so far nothing has come to market—a reflection of just how difficult it is to manufacture this memory in volume. Samsung’s new HBM2E (sold under the Flashbolt brand name, versus the older Aquabolt and Flarebolt brands), offers 33% better performance over HBM2 thanks to doubling the de... » read more

Cloudy Outlook Seen For IC Biz


After a slowdown in the first half of 2019, chipmakers and equipment vendors face a cloudy outlook for the second half of this year, with a possible recovery in 2020. Generally, the semiconductor industry began to see a slowdown starting in mid- to late-2018, which extended into the first half of 2019. During the first half of this year, memory and non-memory vendors were negatively impacted... » read more

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