Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


The Cyberspace Administration of China recommended a ban of Micron chips for critical information infrastructure (CII), alleging serious network security risks. According to a statement from China's Network Security Review Office, "Micron's products have relatively serious potential network security issues, which pose a major security risk to [China's] critical information infrastructure supply... » read more

Memory Disaggregation Research And Making It Practical With Hardware Trends (U. of Michigan)


A new technical paper titled "Memory Disaggregation: Advances and Open Challenges" was published by researchers at University of Michigan. Abstract "Compute and memory are tightly coupled within each server in traditional datacenters. Large-scale datacenter operators have identified this coupling as a root cause behind fleet-wide resource underutilization and increasing Total Cost of Owners... » read more

Etch Processes Push Toward Higher Selectivity, Cost Control


Plasma etching is perhaps the most essential process in semiconductor manufacturing, and possibly the most complex of all fab operations next to photolithography. Nearly half of all fab steps rely on a plasma, an energetic ionized gas, to do their work. Despite ever-shrinking transistor and memory cells, engineers continue to deliver reliable etch processes. “To sustainably create chips... » read more

GDDR6 Delivers The Performance For AI/ML Inference


AI/ML is evolving at a lightning pace. Not a week goes by right now without some new and exciting developments in the field, and applications like ChatGPT have brought generative AI capabilities firmly to the forefront of public attention. AI/ML is really two applications: training and inference. Each relies on memory performance, and each has a unique set of requirements that drive the choi... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Global semiconductor sales reached $574 billion in 2022, and U.S. semiconductor companies accounted for sales totaling $275 billion, or 48% of the global market, according to the 2023 Factbook released by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). DRAM and NAND prices likely will continue to fall further this quarter because production cuts have not kept pace with weakening demand, accord... » read more

3D Structures Challenge Wire Bond Inspection


Adding more layers in packages is making it difficult, and sometimes impossible, to inspect wire bonds that are deep within the different layers. Wire bonds may seem like old technology, but it remains the bonding approach of choice for a broad swath of applications. This is particularly evident in automotive, industrial, and many consumer applications, where the majority of chips are not de... » read more

State of the Art And Future Directions of Rowhammer (ETH Zurich)


A new technical paper titled "Fundamentally Understanding and Solving RowHammer" was published by researchers at ETH Zurich. Abstract "We provide an overview of recent developments and future directions in the RowHammer vulnerability that plagues modern DRAM (Dynamic Random Memory Access) chips, which are used in almost all computing systems as main memory. RowHammer is the phenomenon in... » read more

DDR5 Memory Enables Next-Generation Computing


Computing main memory transitions may only happen once a decade, but when they do, it is a very exciting time in the industry. When JEDEC announced the publication of the JESD79-5 DDR5 SDRAM standard in 2021, it signaled the beginning of the transition to DDR5 server and client dual-inline memory modules (Server RDIMMs, Client UDIMMs and SODIMMs). We are now firmly on this path of enabling the ... » read more

How To Safeguard Memory Interfaces By Design


By Dana Neustadter and Brett Murdock In 2017, the credit bureau Equifax announced that hackers had breached its system, unleashing the personal information of 147-million people. As a result, the company has settled a class action suit for $425 million to aid those impacted, including identity theft, fraud, financial losses, and the expenses to clean up the damage. Whether the threat is iden... » read more

CXL Memory: Detailed Characterization Analysis Using Micro-Benchmarks And Real Applications (UIUC, Intel Labs)


A new technical paper titled "Demystifying CXL Memory with Genuine CXL-Ready Systems and Devices" was published by researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Intel Labs. Abstract: "The high demand for memory capacity in modern datacenters has led to multiple lines of innovation in memory expansion and disaggregation. One such effort is Compute eXpress Link (CXL)-based... » read more

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