tag: Moore’s Law

New Wave Of Consolidation
By Ed Sperling - 22 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 0

Consolidation is picking up again across the semiconductor industry, against a backdrop of looming interest rate hikes, geopolitical uncertainty, and the erosion of longstanding demarcations between markets. In the past couple of weeks, Siemens signed a deal to buy [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"] for $4 billion, and [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"] purchased Harman, a ... » read more

Advanced Packaging Requires Better Yield
By Ed Sperling - 17 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 1

Whether Moore's Laws truly ends, or whether the semiconductor industry reaches into the Angstrom world after 3nm—the semiconductor industry dislikes fractions—advanced packaging increasingly will dominate semiconductor designs. Apple already is on board with its iPhone 7, using TSMC's fan-out approach. And all of the major foundries and OSATs are lining up with a long list of capabilitie... » read more

Making 2.5D, Fan-Outs Cheaper
By Ed Sperling - 17 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 2

Now that it has been shown to work, the race is on to make advanced [getkc id="27" kc_name="packaging"] more affordable. While device scaling could continue for another decade or more, the number of companies that can afford to develop SoCs at the leading edge will continue to decline. The question now being addressed is what can supplant it, supplement it, or redefine it. At the center o... » read more

Politics And (Low) Power
By Ed Sperling - 10 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 4

This week the entire semiconductor market woke up with a severe political hangover. Aside from the initial shock of the election results themselves, the winning platform of "America First" could have far-reaching implications for an industry that has spent decades optimizing a global supply chain the way it has finely tuned other processes to reduce the cost per transistor. There are many un... » read more

Moore’s Law Debate Continues
By Ann Mutschler - 02 Nov, 2016 - Comments: 0

Does shrinking devices still make sense from a cost and performance perspective? The answer isn’t so simple anymore. Still, the discussion as to whether semiconductors are still on track with [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] occurs on a frequent enough basis to continue analyzing at least some of the dynamics at play. There is much speculation about what happens after 7nm, as well as ... » read more

The Battle To Embed The FPGA
By Brian Bailey - 31 Oct, 2016 - Comments: 1

There have been many attempts to embed an [gettech id="31071" comment="FPGA"] into chips in the past, but the market has failed to materialize—or the solutions have failed to inspire. An early example was [getentity id="22924" comment="Triscend"], founded in 1997 and acquired by [getentity id="22839" e_name="Xilinx"] in 2004. It integrated a CPU—which varied from an [getentity id="22186" co... » read more

GPU Accelerated Computing
By D2S - 19 Oct, 2016 - Comments: 0

The computing applications used in semiconductor design and manufacturing have ever-increasing requirements for speed, accuracy and reliability. The continuation of Moore's Law creates a perpetual demand for greater accuracy as, with each new process node, larger numbers of increasingly smaller features are crowded onto each mask and wafer. Computing farms, where thousands of central processing... » read more

Fear Of Machines
By Ed Sperling - 29 Sep, 2016 - Comments: 0

In the tech industry, the main concern over the past five decades has been about what machines could not do. Now the big worry is what they can do. From the outset of the computer age, the biggest challenges were uptime, ease of use, reliability, and as devices became more connected, the quality and reliability of that connection. As the next phase of machines begins, those problems have bee... » read more

450mm And Other Emergency Measures
By Ed Sperling - 22 Sep, 2016 - Comments: 0

Talk about boosting wafer sizes from 300mm to 450mm has been creeping back into presentations and discussions at conferences over the past couple months. Earlier this year, discussions focused on panel-level packaging. These are basically similar approaches to the same problem, which is that wafers need to be larger to reap efficiencies out of device scaling. Whether either of these approach... » read more

The Zen Of Processor Design
By Ed Sperling - 15 Sep, 2016 - Comments: 0

Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at Advanced Micro Devices, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss how to keep improving performance per watt, new packaging options, and the increasing focus on customization for specific tasks. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As we get more into the IoT and we have to deal with more data, not to mention cars where da... » read more

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