What’s Missing In Packaging


The growth of advanced packaging on the leading edge of design is inching backwards into older nodes. With most technology—tools, methodologies, materials and processes—this is business as usual. But in packaging, it's both counterintuitive and potentially problematic. The main reason that companies began investing in advanced packaging—OSATs, foundries, chipmakers such as Intel and Qu... » read more

Challenges And Improvement Of Reliability In Advanced Wafer Level Packaging Technology


The number of WLCSP (wafer-level packages) used in semiconductor packaging has experienced significant growth since its introduction in 1998. The growth has been driven primarily by mobile consumer products because of the small form factor and high performance enabled in the package design. And it is also attractive to wearable electronics and IoT products. Although WLCSSP is now a widely ac... » read more

Noise Abatement


[getkc id="285" kc_name="Noise"] is a fact of life. Almost everything we do creates noise as a by-product and quite often what is a signal to one party is noise to another. Noise cannot be eliminated. It must be managed. But is noise becoming a larger issue in chips as the technology nodes get smaller and packaging becomes more complex? For some, the answer is a very strong yes, while for ot... » read more

The Chiplet Option


All of the leading chipmakers, foundries and OSATs are now working with some sort of advanced packaging. The next step is to add some consistency to those efforts to be able to assemble chips much more quickly and inexpensively. DARPA has been promoting chiplets as the best way to solve this problem, and for the military, this is a pretty logical choice. With a push toward heterogeneity in c... » read more

Integrated Passives Market Gets Active


Integrated passive devices are seeing greater use within system-in-package technology and numerous applications, including the Internet of Things. The tiny devices are making their way into automotive electronics, consumer electronics, and health-care products, among other uses. Europe is leading the way in supplying IPDs, thanks to offerings from Infineon Technologies, STMicroelectronics, a... » read more

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

Plugging Gaps In Advanced Packaging


The growing difficulty of cramming more features into an SoC is driving the entire chip industry to consider new packaging options, whether that is a more complex, integrated SoC or some type of advanced packaging that includes multiple chips. Most of the work done in this area so far has been highly customized. But as advanced packaging heads into the mainstream, gaps are beginning to appea... » read more

What’s After 7nm?


The rollout of 10/7nm was a long time coming, and for good reason. It's hard stuff, and chipmakers have to be ready to take a giant step forward with new processes, tools, and to deal with a slew of physical effects that no longer can be handled by just guard-banding a design. The big question is what's next, when it will happen, and how much it will cost. Preparing for the next process node... » read more

Multi-Physics Combats Commoditization


The semiconductor industry has benefited greatly from developments around digital circuitry. Circuits have grown in size from a few logic gates in the 1980s to well over 1 billion today. In comparison, analog circuits have increased in size by a factor of 10. The primary reason is that digital logic managed to isolate many of the physical effects from functionality, and to provide abstractions ... » read more

Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"], to discuss disruptions and changes in the semiconductor industry, from machine learning and advance packaging to tools and business. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What do you see as the next big thing? Tan: Unlike mobility or cell phones, or PCs before th... » read more

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