Blog Review: Aug. 20


Ansys’ Bill Vandermark highlights the top five engineering articles of the week. Check out the “Sprouting Baby Monitor.” This may be a sign of what the IoT is really good for. You can also use your cat (or dog or even your kids) to hack your neighbor’s Wi-Fi. Cadence’s Richard Goering says gaps may be narrowing between available tools and what’s needed for 3D-IC design. Now all w... » read more

Improving 2.5D Components


A lot of attention is being focused on improving designs at established, well-tested nodes where processes are mature, yields are high, and costs are under control. So what does this mean to stacking die? For 2.5D architectures, plenty. For 3D, probably not much. Here’s why: The advantage of 2.5D is that it can utilize dies created at whatever node makes sense. While the initial discuss... » read more

When Will 2.5D Cut Costs?


There is a constant drive to reduce costs within the semiconductor industry and, up until now, [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] provided an easy path to enable this. By adopting each smaller node, transistors were cheaper, but that is no longer the case, as explained in a recent article. The industry will need to find new technologies to make this happen and some people are looking towards... » read more

EDA’s Hedge Plays


While 14/16nm process technologies with finFETs and double patterning have pushed complexity to new heights, the move to 10nm fundamentally will change a number of very basic elements of the design through manufacturing flow—and EDA vendors will be caught in the middle of having to make hard choices between foundries, processes, packaging approaches, and potentially which markets to serve. ... » read more

2.5/3D IC – Do We Have Liftoff?


The challenges of Moore’s law scaling at advanced technolgy nodes are well documented. I won’t repeat them here. The benefits of “more than Moore” scaling (i.e., 2.5D and 3D ICs) are also well-known. This technology has shown great promise to provide an alternate path for large-scale integration. The technology has seen a lot of research effort, infrastructure support, standards develop... » read more

IP And FinFETs At Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IP and finFETs at advanced nodes with Warren Savage, president and CEO of IPextreme; Aveek Sarkar, vice president of engineering and product support at Ansys-Apache; Randy Smith, vice president of marketing at Sonics, and Bernard Murphy, CTO of Atrenta;. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What happens with the next revs of finFET... » read more

1-on-1 With Intel’s Foundry Chief


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss foundry trends, IC scaling, chip-packaging and other topics with Sunit Rikhi, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel and general manager of Intel’s Custom Foundry unit. SE: Where is Intel at in the foundry business today? Rikhi: We started with a very narrow set of customers. Now, we... » read more

Confusion Does Not Equal Paralysis


After attending the two biggest semiconductor conferences in the world, along with a long list of notable conferences targeted to a wide variety of technologies and engineering disciplines, it’s clear the industry is racing ahead. But “ahead” is now a relative term. While Moore’s Law satisfied both economic and technological requirements, it was easy to figure out what “ahead” me... » read more

After Moore’s Law: More With Less


In the decades when Moore’s Law went unquestioned, the industry was able to migrate to the next smaller node and receive access to more devices that could be used for increased functionality and additional integration. While less significant transistor-level power savings have been seen from the more recent nodes, as leakage currents have increased, the additional levels of integration have b... » read more

Stacked Die Are Coming Soon. Really


Since the beginning of the decade there have been many predictions that stacked die were just over the hill, but the time it has taken to climb that hill has been longer than most people would have anticipated. In fact, TSMC has been fully capable of building stacked die since last year, with risk production expected to be completed by year, according to Gartner. But something very fundament... » read more

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