Product Lifecycle Management For Semiconductors


Product lifecycle management (PLM) and the semiconductor industry have always been separate, but pressure is growing to integrate them. Automotive, IIoT, medical, and other industries see that as the only way to manage many aspects of their business, and as it stands, semiconductors are a large black box in that methodology. The technology space is driven by a mix of top down and bottom-up p... » read more

Advanced Packaging Shifts Design Focus To System Level


Growing momentum for advanced packaging is shifting design from a die-centric focus toward integrated systems with multiple die, but it's also straining some EDA tools and methodologies and creating gaps in areas where none existed. These changes are causing churn in unexpected areas. For some chip companies, this has resulted in a slowdown in hiring of ASIC designers and an uptick in new jo... » read more

A Broad Look Inside Advanced Packaging


Choon Lee, chief technology officer of JCET, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the semiconductor market, Moore’s Law, chiplets, fan-out packaging, and manufacturing issues. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: Where are we in the semiconductor cycle right now? Lee: If you look at 2020, it was around 10% growth in the overall semiconductor industry. ... » read more

Changing Server Architectures In The Data Center


Data centers are undergoing a fundamental shift to boost server utilization and improve efficiency, optimizing architectures so available compute resources can be leveraged wherever they are needed. Traditionally, data centers were built with racks of servers, each server providing computing, memory, interconnect, and possibly acceleration resources. But when a server is selected, some of th... » read more

What’s Next For Emulation


Emulation is now the cornerstone of verification for advanced chip designs, but how emulation will evolve to meet future demands involving increasingly dense, complex, and heterogeneous architectures isn't entirely clear. EDA companies have been investing heavily in emulation, increasing capacity, boosting performance, and adding new capabilities. Now the big question is how else they can le... » read more

Scaling Bump Pitches In Advanced Packaging


Interconnects for advanced packaging are at a crossroads as an assortment of new package types are pushing further into the mainstream, with some vendors opting to extend the traditional bump approaches while others roll out new ones to replace them. The goal in all cases is to ensure signal integrity between components in IC packages as the volume of data being processed increases. But as d... » read more

What’s Next For Transistors And Chiplets


Sri Samavedam, senior vice president of CMOS Technologies at Imec, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about finFET scaling, gate-all-around transistors, interconnects, packaging, chiplets and 3D SoCs. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: The semiconductor technology roadmap is moving in several different directions. We have traditional logic scaling, but packaging i... » read more

Architecting Interposers


An interposer performs a similar function as a printed circuit board (PCB), but when the interposer is moved inside a package the impact is significant. Neither legacy PCB nor IC design tools can fully perform the necessary design and analysis tasks. But perhaps even more important, adding an interposer to a design may require organizational changes. Today, leading-edge companies have shown ... » read more

PCB And IC Technologies Meet In The Middle


Surface-mount technology (SMT) is evolving far beyond its roots as a way of assembling packaged chips onto printed circuit boards without through-holes. It is now moving inside packages that will themselves be mounted on PCBs. But SMT for advanced packages isn’t the same as the SMT we’ve been used to. “Many systems include multiple ASICs, a lot of memory, and that's all integrated i... » read more

Growing Challenges With Wafer Bump Inspection


As advanced packaging goes mainstream, ensuring that wafer bumps are consistent has emerged as a critical concern for foundries and OSATs. John Hoffman, computer vision engineering manager at CyberOptics, talks about the shift toward middle-of-line and how that is affecting inspection and metrology, why there is so much concern over co-planarity and alignment, how variation can add up and creat... » read more

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