Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan Intel officially launched Intel Foundry this week, claiming it's the "world's first systems foundry for the AI era." The foundry also showed off a more detailed technology roadmap down to expanded 14A process technology. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger noted the foundry will be separate from the chipmaker, utilize third-party chiplets and IP, and leverage... » read more

Building CFETs With Monolithic And Sequential 3D


Successive versions of vertical transistors are emerging as the likely successor to finFETs, combining lower leakage with significant area reduction. A stacked nanosheet transistor, introduced at N3, uses multiple channel layers to maintain the overall channel length and necessary drive current while continuing to reduce the standard cell footprint. The follow-on technology, the CFET, pushes... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan. Renesas plans to acquire Altium, maker of PCB design software, for $5.9 billion. In a conference call, Renesas CEO Hidetoshi Shibata cited Altium's PCB design software and digital twin virtual modeling as key components of its future strategy. "I believe it will generate transformational value for our combined customers and our stakeholders," Shib... » read more

SRAM Scaling Issues, And What Comes Next


The inability of SRAM to scale has challenged power and performance goals forcing the design ecosystem to come up with strategies that range from hardware innovations to re-thinking design layouts. At the same time, despite the age of its initial design and its current scaling limitations, SRAM has become the workhorse memory for AI. SRAM, and its slightly younger cousin DRAM, have always co... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Feb. 13


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=197 /] More ReadingTechnical Paper Library home » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Linda Christensen, and Liz Allan.  The Biden administration plans to invest more than $5B  for semiconductor R&D and workforce support, including in the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), as part of the rollout of the CHIPS Act. Today's announcement included at least hundreds of millions for the NSTC workforce efforts, including creating a Workforce Cente... » read more

Evaluation of Cache Replacement Policies Using Various Typical Simulation Approaches


A technical paper titled “Improving the Representativeness of Simulation Intervals for the Cache Memory System” was published by researchers at Complutense University of Madrid, imec, and KU Leuven. Abstract: "Accurate simulation techniques are indispensable to efficiently propose new memory or architectural organizations. As implementing new hardware concepts in real systems is often not... » read more

Many More Hurdles In Heterogeneous Integration


Advanced packaging options continue to stack up in the pursuit of “More than Moore” and higher levels of integration. It has become a place where many high-density interconnects converge, and where many new and familiar problems need to be addressed. The industry’s first foray into fine-pitch multi-die packaging utilized silicon interposers with through-silicon vias (TSVs) to deliver s... » read more

Money Pours Into New Fabs And Facilities


Fabs, packaging, test and assembly, and R&D all drew major funding in 2023. Companies poured money into offshore locations, such as India and Malaysia, to access a larger workforce and lower costs, while also partnering with governments to secure domestic supply chains amid ongoing geopolitical turmoil. Looking ahead, artificial intelligence (AI), quantum computing, and data applications... » read more

Research Bits: Jan. 2


Synaptic transistor Researchers from Northwestern University, Boston College, and MIT developed a synaptic transistor that simultaneously processes and stores information similar to the human brain. The team said the transistor goes beyond simple machine learning tasks to categorize data and is capable of performing associative learning. The new device is stable at room temperatures. It als... » read more

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