Center Stage: The Time For Hybrid Bonding Has Arrived


When the subject of hybrid bonding is brought up in the industry, the focus is often on how this technique is used to manufacture CMOS image sensors (CIS), an essential device for today’s digital cameras, particularly those found in smartphones. As such, CIS is a common touchpoint given the ubiquity of mobile phones, whether you hold a product from Apple, Samsung, or Huawei in your hands. ... » read more

HBM, Nanosheet FETs Drive X-ray Fab Use


Paul Ryan, vice president and general manager of Bruker’s X-ray Business, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the movement of x-ray metrology into manufacturing to better control nanosheet film stacks and solder bump quality. SE: Where are you seeing the greatest growth right now, and what are the critical drivers for your technology from the application side? Ryan: One b... » read more

Data Center Architectures In Flux


Data center architectures are becoming increasingly customized and heterogeneous, shifting from processors made by a single vendor to a mix of processors and accelerators made by multiple vendors — including system companies' own design teams. Hyperscaler data centers have been migrating toward increasingly heterogeneous architectures for the past half decade or so, spurred by the rising c... » read more

Next-Gen 3D Chip/Packaging Race Begins


The first wave of chips is hitting the market using a technology called hybrid bonding, setting the stage for a new and competitive era of 3D-based chip products and advanced packages. AMD is the first vendor to unveil chips using copper hybrid bonding, an advanced die-stacking technology that enables next-generation 3D-like devices and packages. Hybrid bonding stacks and connects chips usin... » read more

A New Dimension Of Complexity For IC Design


Full 3D designs involving logic-on-logic are still in the tire-kicking stage, but gaps in the tooling already are showing up. This is especially evident with static timing analysis (STA), which is used to validate a design’s timing performance by checking all possible paths for timing violations. STA issues began popping up particularly with the introduction of hybrid bonding, a bumpless p... » read more

Future Challenges For Advanced Packaging


Michael Kelly, vice president of advanced packaging development and integration at Amkor, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about advanced packaging and the challenges with the technology. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: We’re in the midst of a huge semiconductor demand cycle. What’s driving that? Kelly: If you take a step back, our industry has always ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 14


3D-SOCs At this week’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), a plethora of companies, R&D organizations and universities presented papers on the latest and greatest technologies. One of the themes at IEDM is advanced packaging, a technology enables an IC vendor to boost the performance of a chip. Advanced forms of packaging also enables new 3D-like chip architectures. Fo... » read more

A Broad Look Inside Advanced Packaging


Choon Lee, chief technology officer of JCET, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the semiconductor market, Moore’s Law, chiplets, fan-out packaging, and manufacturing issues. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: Where are we in the semiconductor cycle right now? Lee: If you look at 2020, it was around 10% growth in the overall semiconductor industry. ... » read more

Challenges With Chiplets And Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss IC packaging technology trends, chiplets, shortages and other topics with William Chen, a fellow at ASE; Michael Kelly, vice president of advanced packaging development and integration at Amkor; Richard Otte, president and CEO of Promex, the parent company of QP Technologies; Michael Liu, senior director of global technical marketing at JCET; and Th... » read more

Piecing Together Chiplets


Several companies are implementing the chiplet model as a means to develop next-generation 3D-like chip designs, but this methodology still has a long way to go before it becomes mainstream for the rest of the industry. It takes several pieces to bring up a 3D chip design using the chiplet model. A few large players have the pieces, though most are proprietary. Others are missing some key co... » read more

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