Smarter Ways To Manufacture Chips


OSAT and wafer fabs are beginning to invest in Industry 4.0 solutions in order to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs, but it's a complicated process that involves setting up frameworks to evaluate different options and goals. Semiconductor manufacturing facilities have relied on dedicated automation teams for decades. These teams track and schedule chip production, respond to equi... » read more

Mechanical Challenges Rise With Heterogeneous Integration


Companies integrating multiple chips or chiplets into a package will need to address structural and other mechanical engineering issues, but gaps in the design tools, new materials and interconnect technologies, and a shortage of expertise are making it difficult to address those issues. Throughout most of the history of the semiconductors, few people outside of foundries worried about struc... » read more

Power Semiconductors: A Deep Dive Into Materials, Manufacturing & Business


Whether you’re the owner of the average smartphone, commuting on trains, or driving around in a Tesla, you use power semiconductor devices every day. In a technology-dependent world, these devices are everywhere, and demand for more types of chips using different materials is growing. In the past, most engineers paid little attention to power semiconductors. They were deemed commodity, off... » read more

Big Changes Ahead In Power Delivery, Materials, And Interconnects


Part one of this forecast looked at evolving transistor architectures and lithography platforms. This report examines revolutions in interconnects and packaging. When it comes to device interconnects, it’s hard to beat copper. Its low resistivity and high reliability have served the industry exceedingly well as both on-chip interconnect and wires between chips. But in logic chips, with int... » read more

Mini-Consortia Forming Around Chiplets


Mini-consortia for chiplets are sprouting up across the industry, driven by demands for increasing customization in tight market windows and fueled by combinations of hardened IP that have been proven in silicon. These loosely aligned partnerships are working to develop LEGO-like integration models for highly specific applications and end markets. But they all are starting small, because it'... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Samsung announced plans to invest $230 billion (300 trillion won) over the next two decades to construct the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturing complex in South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province, reports AP. The complex will consist of five new semiconductor plants producing memory and logic chips. Chips will be the enabling engines, requiring massive investments in new technology, m... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


North Americas’s first zero-emission hydrogen-powered “Train de Charlevoix” will start running in Canada this summer, with speeds up to 85 mph, only emitting water vapor. Germany rolled out the world’s first passenger train fleet in 2022. The U.S. Department of Energy announced the availability of $750 million for R&D to further clean hydrogen technologies, part of the Biparti... » read more

Managing Thermal-Induced Stress In Chips


At advanced nodes and in the most advanced packages, physics is no one's friend. Escalating density, smaller features, and thinner dies make it more difficult to dissipate heat, and they increase mechanical stress. On the flip side, thinner dielectrics and tighter spaces make it more difficult to insulate and protect against that heat, and in conjunction with those smaller features and higher d... » read more

ILP-Based Router for Wire-Bonding FBGA Packaging Design


A new technical paper titled "ILP-Based Substrate Routing with Mismatched Via Dimension Consideration for Wire-bonding FBGA Package Design" was written by researchers at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. "In this paper, we propose an integer linear programming (ILP)-based router for wire-bonding FBGA packaging design. Our ILP formulation not only can handle design-depende... » read more

Chip Industry’s Earnings Roundup


Editor's Note: Updated throughout February 2023 for additional earnings releases. Many companies reported revenue growth in the most recent quarter, but the latest round of chip industry earnings releases reflected some major themes: Demand for consumer electronics softened due to inflation, rising interest rates, and post-pandemic market saturation, creating a slump in the memory chip ... » read more

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