Moore’s Law: A Status Report


Moore's Law has been synonymous with "smaller, faster, cheaper" for the past 52 years, but increasingly it is viewed as just one of a number of options—some competing, some complementary—as the chip industry begins zeroing in on specific market needs. This does not make [getkc id="74" comment="Moore's Law"] any less relevant. The number of companies racing from 16/14nm to 7nm is higher t... » read more

The Case For Narrowband-IoT


Cellular network-based Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is marching closer to reality as players across the ecosystem put forth silicon IP, software protocol stacks, carrier network software upgrades and more. The kicker came last year when the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), the global cellular industry standards body, finalized a NB-IoT standard in its 'release 13.' With that, device mak... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Manufacturing Veeco Instruments has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Ultratech. With the deal, Veeco will enter into the lithography market for chip-packaging as well as the laser spike anneal business. Veeco is a supplier of MOCVD tools. The implied total transaction value is approximately $815 million and the implied enterprise value is approximately $550 million. FlexTech, a SE... » read more

5G & IoT


“Designing to Evolving 4G and Pre-5G Requirements” was the title of a Tuesday morning tutorial at DesignCon 2017 in Santa Clara, Calif. Talk of 5G naturally segued into Internet of Things discussion during the session. Parviz Yegani, a consultant with GHB Intellect, laid out the IoT use cases that could be enhanced by 5G technology: Shopping, population-dense urban areas, remote computin... » read more

China Unveils Memory Plans


Backed by billions of dollars in government funding, China in 2014 launched a major initiative to advance its domestic semiconductor, IC-packaging and other electronic sectors. So far, though, the results are mixed. China is making progress in IC-packaging, but the nation’s efforts to advance its domestic logic and memory sectors are still a work in progress. In fact, China has yet to achi... » read more

What’s Missing In Advanced Packaging


Even though Moore's Law is running out of steam, there is still a need to increase functional density. Increasingly, this is being done with heterogeneous integration at the package or module level. This is proving harder than it looks. At this point there are no standardized methodologies, and tools often are retrofitted versions of existing tools that don't take into account the challenges... » read more

Changes In China


By Jesse Zhang, SEMI China Industry leaders gathered in Beijing at BIMS 2016 — the Beijing International Microelectronics Symposium — to discuss growth opportunities for the semiconductor industry and the mobile communications market. The 17th session of BIMS was co-sponsored by SEMI and the Chinese-American Semiconductor Professionals Association (CASPA). For 17 years, BIMS has provi... » read more

Making 2.5D, Fan-Outs Cheaper


Now that it has been shown to work, the race is on to make advanced [getkc id="27" kc_name="packaging"] more affordable. While device scaling could continue for another decade or more, the number of companies that can afford to develop SoCs at the leading edge will continue to decline. The question now being addressed is what can supplant it, supplement it, or redefine it. At the center o... » read more

Teaching Computers To See


Vision processing is emerging as a foundation technology for a number of high-growth applications, spurring a wave of intensive research to reduce power, improve performance, and push embedded vision into the mainstream to leverage economies of scale. What began as a relatively modest development effort has turned into an all-out race for a piece of this market, and for good reason. Mark... » read more

Neural Net Computing Explodes


Neural networking with advanced parallel processing is beginning to take root in a number of markets ranging from predicting earthquakes and hurricanes to parsing MRI image datasets in order to identify and classify tumors. As this approach gets implemented in more places, it is being customized and parsed in ways that many experts never envisioned. And it is driving new research into how el... » read more

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