Addressing Pain Points In Chip Design


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the impact of multi-physics and new market applications on chip design with John Lee, general manager and vice president of ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx, Duane Boning, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; and Thomas Harms, director EDA/IP Alliance at Infineon. What foll... » read more

Which Verification Engine When


Frank Schirrmeister, group director for product marketing at Cadence, talks about which tools get used throughout the design flow, from architecture to simulation, formal verification, emulation, prototyping all the way to production, how the cloud has impacted the direction of the flow, and how machine learning will impact verification. » read more

Migrating 3D Into The Mainstream


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes required throughout the ecosystem to support three-dimensional (3D) chip design with Norman Chang, chief technologist for ANSYS' Semiconductor Business Unit; 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 Business;... » read more

IP Management And Development At 5/3nm


The growing complexity of moving to new process nodes is making it much more difficult to create, manage and re-use IP. There are more rules, more data to manage, and more potential interactions as density increases, both in planar implementations and in advanced packaging. And the problems only get worse as designs move to 5nm and 3nm, and as more heterogeneous components such as accelerato... » read more

Making Random Variation Less Random


The economics for random variation are changing, particularly at advanced nodes and in complex packaging schemes. Random variation always will exist in semiconductor manufacturing processes, but much of what is called random has a traceable root cause. The reason it is classified as random is that it is expensive to track down all of the various quirks in a complex manufacturing process or i... » read more

Scaling Up And Down


You don’t have to look very far in the semiconductor world before you see the word “scaling.” Perhaps you read an industry news article headline about transistor scaling – how those nearly nanoscale components are shrinking even smaller in size down to the atomic scale. Or maybe you heard a reference to memory capacity scaling – how our favorite mobile devices can store more high-reso... » read more

Who’s Watching The Supply Chain?


Every company developing chips at the most advanced process nodes these days is using different architectures and heterogeneous processing and memory elements. There simply is no other way to get the kind of power/performance improvements needed to justify the expense of moving to a new process node. So while they will reap the benefits of traditional scaling, that alone is no longer enough. ... » read more

What’s The Best Advanced Packaging Option?


As traditional chip designs become more unwieldy and expensive at each node, many IC vendors are exploring or pursuing alternative approaches using advanced packaging. The problem is there are too many advanced packaging options on the table already, and the list continues to grow. Moreover, each option has several tradeoffs and challenges, and all of them are still relatively expensive. ... » read more

Process To Produce High Aspect Ratio Electroplated Copper Pillars On 300 mm Wafers


This work provides details of a complete and partially optimized process to manufacture high aspect ratio copper pillars with heights of up to 80 µm on 200 and 300 mm wafers. Across wafer uniformity data for all materials and process steps are given. Results will show excellent resist adhesion on copper and electroplating durability. Cross sectional SEM analysis of resist and electroplated pil... » read more

Pushing Memory Harder


In an optimized system, no component is waiting for another component while there is useful work to be done. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the processor/memory interface. Put simply, memory cannot keep up. Accessing memory is slow, and it can consume a significant fraction of the power budget. And the general consensus is this problem is not going away anytime soon, despite effort... » read more

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