Chips Getting More Secure, But Not Quickly Enough


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the impact of heterogeneous integration, more advanced RISC-V designs, and a growing awareness of security threats, with Mike Borza, Synopsys scientist; John Hallman, product manager for trust and security at Siemens EDA; Pete Hardee, group director for product management at Cadence; Paul Karazuba, vice president of marketin... » read more

Enabling New Functionality In Medtech And Biotech Devices


Medtech and biotech devices are uniquely suited to benefit from emerging electronic capabilities – specifically, the kind of electronics design, packaging and assembly offerings that are Promex’s specialty. With that said, these markets present a variety of manufacturing challenges and demands that require heterogeneous integration (HI) to address. This two-part blog post provides a high... » read more

Heterogeneous Chip Assembly Helps Optimize Medical And Wearable Devices


Heterogeneous integration (HI) has significant implications for the medical, health, and wearables industry. At Promex, we utilize a variety of complex assembly processes to achieve HI for medical and biotech applications. This post will take a closer look at the processes associated with assembling these classes of devices. Click here to read more. » read more

Impact Of Increased IC Performance On Memory


Increasing performance in advanced semiconductors is becoming more difficult as chips become more complex. There are more physical effects to contend with, different use cases, and challenges in making memory go faster. In addition, aging effects that once were ignored are now becoming critical concerns. Steven Woo, fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, talks about different factors that... » read more

Room-Temperature Metal Bonding Technology That Facilitates The Fabrication of 3D-ICs & 3D Integration With Heterogeneous Devices


A technical paper titled "Room-Temperature Direct Cu Semi-Additive Plating (SAP) Bonding for Chip-on-Wafer 3D Heterogenous Integration With μLED" was published by researchers at Tohoku University in Japan. Abstract: "This letter describes a direct Cu bonding technology to there-dimensionally integrate heterogeneous dielets based on a chip-on-wafer configuration. 100- μm -cubed blue μ LED... » read more

Test Challenges Mount As Demands For Reliability Increase


An emphasis of improving semiconductor quality is beginning to spread well beyond just data centers and automotive applications, where ICs play a role in mission- and safety-critical applications. But this focus on improved reliability is ratcheting up pressure throughout the test community, from lab to fab and into the field, in products where transistor density continues to grow — and wh... » read more

How To Build Resilience Into Chips


Disaggregating chips into specialized processors, memories, and architectures is becoming necessary for continued improvements in performance and power, but it's also contributing to unusual and often unpredictable errors in hardware that are extremely difficult to find. The sources of those errors can include anything from timing errors in a particular sequence, to gaps in bonds between chi... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Imec released its semiconductor roadmap, which calls for doubling compute power every six months to handle the data explosion and new data-intensive problems. Imec named five walls (scaling, memory, power, sustainability, cost) that need to be dismantled. The roadmap (below) stretches from 7nm to 0.2nm (2 angstroms) by 2036, and includes four generations of gate-all-around FETs followed by thre... » read more

Unknowns And Challenges In Advanced Packaging


Dick Otte, CEO of Promex Industries, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about unknowns in material properties, the impact on bonding, and why environmental factors are so important in complex heterogeneous packages. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Companies have been designing heterogeneous chips to take advantage of specific applications or use cases, but th... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects


Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

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