Navigating Reliability Potholes: Early 3D Stress Analysis For Automotive ICs


The rise of 3D integrated circuits (ICs) and heterogeneous packaging is reshaping how automotive ICs fulfill demanding analog and sensor requirements. Whether for radar, lidar, sensor fusion or domain controllers, advanced packaging enables new levels of integration—and performance—in automotive electronics. Yet, as these architectures grow more complex, they also introduce new forms of mec... » read more

3D-ICs In The Automotive Market: Breaking Barriers With AI-Driven EDA Tools


The automotive industry is experiencing a significant transformation as it adopts innovations like autonomous driving technologies and ultra-connected ecosystems. At the core of this change is a rising demand for compact, high-performance semiconductor solutions that can handle the increasing complexity of modern vehicle architecture. One promising development is three-dimensional integrated ci... » read more

Calibre 3DStress: Advanced Stress Analysis For Reliable 3D IC Design


As the industry transitions toward advanced 3D IC architectures and heterogeneous integration, managing thermo-mechanical stress is essential for product quality and long-term reliability. Calibre 3DStress enables design and packaging teams to simulate, analyze and disposition stresses imparted on the chip during or after the packaging process, ensuring that potential failure risks—such as wa... » read more

Chiplet Interfaces Embrace Failures


Redundancy in chiplet interfaces is now a prerequisite for achieving sufficient yield in high-performance computing devices, which today are packed with tens of thousands of interconnects. And as the number and density of those interconnects increases, the prospects for yield only worsen. For more than two decades, high-speed I/O interfaces have included reliability strategies to manage in-f... » read more

3DICs: Atomic-Scale Behavior of Electromigration in Cu−Cu Joints (NYCU, ITRI)


A new technical paper titled "In Situ Atomic-Scale Investigation of Electromigration Behavior in Cu–Cu Joints at High Current Density" was published by researchers at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU) and the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). Excerpt "Electromigration (EM) poses significant challenges to the reliability of miniaturized devices, particularly th... » read more

Can Today’s Processor Architectures Be More Efficient?


For years, processors focused on performance, and that performance had little accountability to anything else. Performance still matters, but now it must be accountable to power. If small gains in performance result in disproportionate power gains, designers may need to discard such improvements in favor of more power-efficient ones. Although current architectures undergo a steady cadence of... » read more

Co-Packaged Optics Reaches Power Efficiency Tipping Point


Commercialization has started for network switches based on co-packaged optics (CPO), which are capable of routing signals at terabits per second speeds, but manufacturing challenges remain regarding fiber-to-photonic IC alignment, thermal mitigation, and optical testing strategies. By moving the optical-to-electronic data conversion as close as possible to the GPU/ASIC switch in data center... » read more

Executive Outlook: Chiplets, 3D-ICs, and AI


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chiplets and the challenges of moving to 3D-ICs with Bill Mullen, Ansys fellow; John Ferguson, senior director of product management at Siemens EDA; Chris Mueth, senior director of new markets and strategic initiatives at Keysight; Albert Zeng, senior engineering group director at Cadence; Anand Thiruvengadam, senior director and head of AI product ... » read more

Thermo-Mechanical Stress On Active Chiplets In A 3D-IC Heterogeneous Package Assembly


The move to heterogeneous multi-chip/chiplet products improves yield, performance and modularity while reducing power and overall product footprint. However, this shift to heterogeneous assembly also introduces new complexities that can influence chip warpage and circuit behavior due to thermo-mechanical stress impacts. In heterogeneous 3D IC architectures, the interaction between the chips ... » read more

Development Flows For Chiplets


Chiplets offer a huge leap in semiconductor functionality and productivity, just like soft IP did 40 years ago, but a lot has to come together before that becomes reality. It takes an ecosystem, which is currently very rudimentary. Today, many companies have hit the reticle limit and are forced to move to multi-die solutions, but that does not create a plug-and-play chiplet market. These ear... » read more

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