Advanced Packaging’s Progress


Shim Il Kwon, CTO at STATS ChipPAC, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the current and future trends of chip packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) vendors provide third-party IC-packaging and test services. What are the big challenges for OSATs today? Shim: The OSAT market is very competitive, w... » read more

Managing Peak Power


Peak power is becoming a serious design constraint across chips and entire electronic systems as more functionality is added into end devices and the compute and switching infrastructure needed to support them. The issues are a direct result of growing complexity in designs, fixed or shrinking power budgets, and the need to process more data more quickly. In mobile devices, the addition of m... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Conferences Artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and 5G wireless communications were the talk of this week’s Mobile World Congress Americas event at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Interesting topics, to be sure, yet they were eclipsed by a panel discussion on Wednesday afternoon about a matter of life or death. At a program put together by 151 Advisors, one of the panel ses... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Cadence unveiled an integrated memory design and verification tool, with environments for bitcell design, array and complier verification, and memory characterization. It utilizes existing simulation databases for multi-corner and Monte Carlo analysis, which the company says can lead to a 2X runtime improvement. Solido Design Automation uncorked PVTMC Verifier, which uses machine lear... » read more

A Chip For All Seasons


FPGAs are showing up in more designs and in more markets, and as they get included in more systems they are becoming much more complex. A decade ago, the key markets for [gettech id="31071" t_name="FPGAs"] were industrial, medical, automotive and aerospace. Those markets remain strong, but FPGAs also are playing a role in artificial intelligence, data centers, the [getkc id="76" kc_name="... » read more

The 200mm Equipment Scramble


An explosion in 200mm demand has set off a frenzied search for used semiconductor manufacturing equipment that can be used at older process nodes. The problem is there is not enough used equipment available, and not all of the new or expanding 200mm fabs can afford to pay the premium for refurbished or new equipment. This may sound like a straightforward supply and demand issue, but behind t... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Connectivity Longing for LightSquared? The once-bankrupt company that tried to build a network with satellite airwaves and traditional spectrum has been reborn as Ligado Networks, which wants to serve 5G and Industrial Internet of Things applications with a mobile data network, employing satellite communications and other resources. Its founder is Philip Falcone, who was the guiding force behi... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Connectivity M1 Limited of Singapore worked with Nokia to launch a nationwide narrowband Internet of Things network, targeting such applications as asset tracking, environmental monitoring, fleet management, and smart energy management for buildings. M1 hopes to boost the IoT ecosystem in Singapore with the new NB-IoT network. M&A DuPont has agreed to acquire Granular, a provider of digita... » read more

5G Test Equipment Race Begins


Test and measurement vendors stand ready to help with the development and deployment of 5G wireless communications, as the technology is fine-tuned and tested in trials around the world. Juniper Research forecasts 5G operator-billed service revenues will rise to $269 billion by 2025, compared with $851 million in 2019, for a compound annual growth rate of 161% during the first seven years of... » read more

Carriers Push Datacenter-Style Virtualization


The world’s largest telco carriers are leading a broad movement to bring data center-style virtualization to the core of their telecommunications networks. In an industry known for being extremely conservative when it comes to change, this one appears to be significant. The move has set off a scramble among a number of companies for unified control and forwarding plane designs, starting fr... » read more

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