Foundries Expand Their Scope


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus Major foundries are stepping up their offerings across a wide swath of technology nodes, specialty processes and advanced packaging—a recognition that end markets are fragmenting and that the path forward includes a mix of new and established processes. As the smart phone market flattens, there is no single "next big thing" to drive volume at the most ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers TSMC remained the world’s largest foundry vendor with a 54.3% share in 2015, according to the rankings from Gartner. GlobalFoundries moved into the No. 2 position with 9.6% of the market. The No. 3 position went to UMC with $4.5 billion in revenue, representing 9.3% of the market, according to the firm, which said Samsung remains No. 4. SMIC, which is No. 5, is gaining ground. ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system from IBM. A single TrueNorth processor from IBM consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons. The chip is fabricated based on a 28nm LPP pro... » read more

Is Your IoT Network Just Another Playground For Hackers?


Let's talk about how the IoT is evolving. Last year, Gartner published a study that said 5.5 million new “things” were being connected to the Internet every day. The study predicts that by the end of this year there will be 6.4 billion connected devices, and by 2020 there will be 20.8 billion connected devices. That’s a lot of connected things to keep track of and to protect fro... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


The SPIE Advanced Lithography conference is next week. “The conference should provide an update on extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) sentiment from chipmakers such as Intel and TSMC, and we expect generally positive sentiment, which should be good for ASML. Still, high-volume adoption timing of EUV appears to be in the 2020 time frame, so it's very early in the process. We expect a lot of... » read more

Consolidation Hits OSAT Biz


The outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) industry is undergoing a new wave of acquisition activity that will dramatically reshape the packaging and test services markets. [getkc id="83" kc_name="OSATs"] have seen a considerable amount of consolidation over the years, but the industry needs a scorecard to keep track of the recent deals and the resulting fallout. One OSAT deal inv... » read more

Inside Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced IC-packaging, the OSAT industry, China and other topics with Ron Huemoeller, vice president of worldwide R&D at Amkor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are we in advanced IC-packaging today? Huemoeller: We’ve hit the inflection point. Now we are coming to the other side of it. Regarding this need to int... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung introduced inFlux, a new lineup of high-flux, linear LED modules optimized for industrial lighting applications such as plants, parking lots and warehouses. The LED modules serve as a replacement for conventional T8 and T5HO tubes and are suitable for high-flux LED luminaires covering up to 40,000lm. The semiconductor market is off to a slow start in 2016. And it might be a long yea... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Qualcomm recently announced the new Snapdragon 820. The cell-phone chipset is based on Samsung Electronics’ new 14nm LPP (Low-Power Plus) process, the second-generation of the company’s 14nm finFET process technology. What’s next? Qualcomm is developing the Snapdragon 830. “Snapdragon 830 leaks indicate that the chip will sport 8GB of RAM, an enhanced Kryo custom architecture, and fabbe... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung Electronics announced that it has begun producing the industry’s first 4-gigabyte DRAM package based on the second-generation High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) interface. The 4GB HBM2 package is created by stacking a buffer die at the bottom and four 8-gigabit core dies on top. These are then vertically interconnected by TSV holes and microbumps. A single 8Gb HBM2 die contains over 5,000 T... » read more

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