tag: imec

The March Toward Chiplets
By Ed Sperling and Karen Heyman - 15 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

The days of monolithic chips developed at the most advanced process nodes are rapidly dwindling. Nearly everyone working at the leading edge of design is looking toward some type of advanced packaging using discrete heterogeneous components. The challenge now is how to shift the whole chip industry into this disaggregated model. It's going to take time, effort, as well as a substantial reali... » read more

3D-IC Reliability Degrades With Increasing Temperature
By Ann Mutschler - 14 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 0

The reliability of 3D-IC designs is dependent upon the ability of engineering teams to control heat, which can significantly degrade performance and accelerate circuit aging. While heat has been problematic in semiconductor design since at least 28nm, it is much more challenging to deal with inside a 3D package, where electromigration can spread to multiple chips on multiple levels. “Be... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Karen Heyman - 09 Dec, 2022 - Comments: 2

The more than 1,400 attendees at this week’s IEDM, which celebrated the 75th anniversary of the transistor, were clearly focused on making the next 75 years of semiconductors even more remarkable than the last. Intel, Samsung, TSMC, STMicroelectronics, GlobalFoundries and imec announced breakthrough devices, materials, and even integration approaches. These included: Intel showcased adva... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Nov. 29
By Linda Christensen - 29 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=66 /]   Related Reading: Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Nov. 21 New papers: lithography modeling; solving Rowhammer; energy-efficient batch normalization HW; 3-to-1 reconfigurable analog signal modulation circuit; lateral double magnetic tunnel junction; reduce branch mispredic... » read more

Wafer-Scale Variability In Photonic Devices & Effects On Circuits
By Technical Paper Link - 25 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

A technical paper titled "Capturing the Effects of Spatial Process Variations in Silicon Photonic Circuits" was published by researchers at Photonics Research Group, Ghent University−IMEC. "We present in this paper a method to extract a granular map of the line width and thickness variation on a silicon photonics wafer. We propose a hierarchical model to separate the layout-dependent and l... » read more

Challenges In Backside Power Delivery
By Laura Peters - 17 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

One of the key technologies to enable scaling below 3nm involves delivering of power on the backside of a chip. This novel approach enhances signal integrity and reduces routing congestion, but it also creates some new challenges for which today there are no simple solutions. Backside power delivery (BPD) eliminates the need to share interconnect resources between signal and power lines on t... » read more

Hot Trends In Semiconductor Thermal Management
By Karen Heyman - 17 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Increasing thermal challenges, as the industry moves into 3D packaging and continues to scale digital logic, are pushing the limits of R&D. The basic physics of having too much heat trapped in too small a space is leading to tangible problems, like consumer products that are too hot to hold. Far worse, however, is the loss of power and reliability, as overheated DRAM has to continually r... » read more

Blog Review: Nov. 16
By Jesse Allen - 16 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

Siemens EDA's Jake Wiltgen explains the difference between transient and permanent faults when designing to the ISO 26262 standard, including where they come from and key ways to protect against them. Synopsys' Vikas Gautam points to how the economics of designing large SoCs is driving chiplet-based designs and the need for die-to-die standards such as UCIe, along with the key protocol verif... » read more

Metrology Of Thin Resist For High NA EUVL
By Nova - 16 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 0

One of the many constrains of high numerical aperture extreme ultraviolet lithography (High NA EUVL) is related to resist thickness. In fact, one of the consequences of moving from current 0.33NA to 0.55NA (high NA) is the depth of focus (DOF) reduction. In addition, as the resist feature lines shrink down to 8nm half pitch, it is essential to limit the aspect ratio to avoid pattern collapse. T... » read more

Balancing Power And Heat In Advanced Chip Designs
By Karen Heyman - 10 Nov, 2022 - Comments: 1

Power and heat use to be someone else's problem. That's no longer the case, and the issues are spreading as more designs migrate to more advanced process nodes and different types of advanced packaging. There are a number of reasons for this shift. To begin with, there are shrinking wire diameters, thinner dielectrics, and thinner substrates. The scaling of wires requires more energy to driv... » read more

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