Time For Massively Parallel Testing


Time is money in electronics, as in other industries, and the more time that is invested in testing chips means more costs being added to the product in question. To speed up testing for memory devices and other semiconductors, test equipment vendors have resorted to parallel testing technology, simultaneously testing multiple chips at a time. The industry also is turning to system-level tes... » read more

Electroplating IC Packages


The electrochemical deposition (ECD) equipment market for IC packaging is heating up as 2.5D, 3D and fan-out technologies begin to ramp. [getentity id="22817" e_name="Applied Materials"]  recently rolled out an ECD system for IC packaging. In addition, Lam Research, TEL and others compete in the growing but competitive ECD equipment market for packaging. ECD—sometimes referred to as pl... » read more

LiDAR Completes Sensing Triumvirate


Fully autonomous vehicles of the future will depend on a combination of different sensing technologies – advanced vision systems, radar, and light imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR). Of the three, LiDAR is now the costliest part of that equation, and there are worldwide efforts to bring down those costs. Mechanical LiDAR units are currently available, priced in the hundreds of dollars... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers At an event, Intel’s Technology and Manufacturing group outlined the company's vision. As part of the event, Intel reiterated what many are saying—the current node designations are meaningless and misleading. “For example, Intel estimates that its 14nm solution that has been out in the market since 2014 should be equal to 10nm solutions released by competitors in the near futu... » read more

Learn From The Experts


I visited SNUG Silicon Valley last week. This annual Synopsys User Group event at the Santa Clara Convention Center is always a good way to get in touch with the end users of various EDA products. I attended the technical track with experts from ARM, NVIDIA, Intel and Synopsys, who talked about their experience in accelerating software development, hardware verification and system validation... » read more

Supporting CPUs Plus FPGAs (Part 1)


While it has been possible to pair a CPU and FPGA for quite some time, two things have changed recently. First, the industry has reduced the latency of the connection between them and second, we now appear to have the killer app for this combination. Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss these changes and the state of the tool chain to support this combination, with Kent Orthner, system... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Services AT&T and IBM are expanding their joint Internet of Things effort to offer AT&T’s new IoT analytics capability, helping customers yield insights from their industrial IoT data. The capability takes in AT&T’s M2X, Flow Designer, Control Center, and other IoT offerings; IBM Watson IoT; the IBM Watson Data Platform; and the IBM Machine Learning Service, part of Watson Data Platform on... » read more

Challenges Grow For IP Reuse


As chip complexity increases, so does the complexity of IP blocks being developed for those designs. That is making it much more difficult to re-use IP from one design to the next, or even to integrate new IP into an SoC. What is changing is the perception that standard [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] works the same in every design. Moreover, well-developed [getkc id="100" kc_name="methodologie... » read more

Blog Review: March 22


Cadence's Paul McLellan shares TSMC's plans for 5nm and gate-all-around FET, plus other highlights from last week's Technology Symposium. Mentor's Craig Armenti examines how product development teams can increase efficiency through concurrent schematic design. Synopsys' Jim Ivers warns of the data security and privacy issues posed by a wave of popular connected toys. At Embedded World,... » read more

The Week In Review: IoT


Government Maureen Ohlhausen, the acting head of the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview that she looks to manufacturers of Internet-connected devices to decide on best practices for the Internet of Things. Although the FTC has the legal authority to set regulations for a variety of industries, Ohlhausen said the commission is “not primarily a regulator,” in line with the new ad... » read more

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