The Darker Side Of Hybrid Bonding

By Katherine Derbyshire - 17 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 2

With semiconductors, it's often things everyone takes for granted that cause the biggest headaches, and that problem is compounded when something fundamental changes — such as bonding two chips together using a process aimed at maximizing performance. Case in point: CMP for backend of the line metallization in hybrid bonding. While this is a mature process, it doesn't easily translate for ... » read more

The Cyber-Industrial Revolution

By Ed Sperling - 07 Dec, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductors won't save the world, but they certainly will help. In fact, it's arguable whether any significant progress will be made on such issues as global warming or future medical breakthroughs without the aid of ICs. After decades of struggling just to get chips to work at each new process node, the semiconductor industry is moving into a new phase. Processing is now almost ubiquitou... » read more

Is Hardware-Assisted Verification Avoidable?

By Brian Bailey - 29 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 1

Emulation is emerging as the tool of choice for complex and large designs, but companies that swap from simulation to emulation increasingly recognize this is not an easy transition. It requires money, time, and effort, and even then not everyone gets it right. Still, there are significant benefits to moving from simulation to emulation, providing these systems can be utilized efficiently en... » read more

Rethinking The Scaling Mantra

By Ed Sperling - 26 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

What makes a new chip better than a previous version, or a competitor's version, has been changing for some time. In most cases the key metrics are still performance and power, but what works for one application or use case increasingly is different from another. Advancements are rarely tied just to process nodes these days. Even the most die-hard proponents of Moore's Law recognize that the... » read more

Regaining The Edge In U.S. Chip Manufacturing

By Mark LaPedus & Ann Steffora Mutschler - 26 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 16

The United States is developing new strategies to prevent it from falling further behind Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps even China in semiconductor manufacturing, as trade tensions and national security concerns continue to grow. For years, the U.S. has been a leader in the development of new chip products like GPUs and microprocessors. But from a chip manufacturing standpoint, the U.S. is losin... » read more

The Quest To Make 5G Systems Reliable

By Ed Sperling - 13 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss 5G reliability with Anthony Lord, director of RF product marketing at FormFactor; Noam Brousard, system vice president at proteanTecs; Andre van de Geijn, business development manager at yieldHUB; and David Hall, head of semiconductor marketing at National Instruments. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How do we measure the reli... » read more

Israel: Startup Powerhouse

By Ed Sperling - 05 Oct, 2020 - Comments: 0

Israel is at the front of pack with China and the United States when it comes to tech startups. But when it comes to large, indigenous tech giants, the country is nowhere to be seen. Virtually every major semiconductor company does business in Israel, and many have a strong presence there through centers of excellence or companies they have acquired. But after decades of innovation ranging f... » read more

The Battery Problem

By Ed Sperling - 14 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 2

The fires sweeping the West Coast of the United States point to the need for a whole different way of managing power on both a macro and a micro level. Since the millennium, the power demand from data centers and from mobile devices has been climbing steadily. There are roughly 7.8 billion people on the planet, up from 6.115 billion people in 2000, according to the World Bank. Many of them o... » read more

Better Inspection, Higher Yield

By Bryon Moyer - 08 Sep, 2020 - Comments: 0

Wafers can be inspected for large, obvious defects, or for small, subtle ones. The former is referred to as macro-inspection, while the latter is micro-inspection. These processes use different machines with different capital and operating costs, and they might look like competing approaches with different economic returns. In fact, they are complementary tactics that can be balanced within an ... » read more

Moore’s Law Enters The 4th Dimension

By Ed Sperling - 21 Aug, 2020 - Comments: 5

The basic idea that more transistors are better hasn't changed in more than half a century. In fact, the overriding theme of a number of semiconductor conferences this month is that we will never have enough compute capability or storage capacity. In the past, when the number of transistors in a given area actually did double every 18 to 24 months, increasing density per square millimeter fo... » read more

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Knowledge Centers
Entities, people and technologies explored

Shift Left Is The Tip Of The Iceberg

A transformative change is underway for semiconductor design and EDA. New languages, models, and abstractions will need to be created.

by Brian Bailey

Partitioning In The Chiplet Era

Understanding how chiplets interact under different workloads is critical to ensuring signal integrity and optimal performance in heterogeneous designs.

by Ann Mutschler

3.5D: The Great Compromise

Pros and cons of a middle-ground chiplet assembly that combines 2.5D and 3D-IC.

by Ed Sperling

AI’s Role In Chip Design Widens, Drawing In New Startups

Focus is on letting engineers do much more with the same or fewer resources — and less drudgery.

by Karen Heyman

Key Technologies To Extend EUV To 14 Angstroms

Alongside high-NA EUV will be better-performing photoresists, reduced roughness using passivation and etch, and lateral etching to reduce tip-to-tip dimensions.

by Laura Peters

What Comes After HBM For Chiplets

The standard for high-bandwidth memory limits design freedom at many levels, but that is required for interoperability. What freedoms can be taken from other functions to make chiplets possible?

by Brian Bailey

Memory Fundamentals For Engineers

eBook: Nearly everything you need to know about memory, including detailed explanations of the different types of memory; how and where these are used today; what's changing, which memories are successful and which ones might be in the future; and the limitations of each memory type.

by The SE Staff

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving

Megafabs churning out the most advanced processors are not the only game in town.

by Bryon Moyer

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