A High-Capacity Solution for Power and Signal Integrity on 2.5D Silicon Interposers


The present trends in technology — such as increasing demand for computational power from CPUs and GPUs, connectivity driven by Internet of Things (IoT), data demands around connected and self-driving cars, and the design of processors optimized for artificial intelligence (AI) — require more functionality from integrated circuits. As designers struggle to find ways to scale with complexity... » read more

Why There Are Still No Commercial 3D-ICs


Building chips in three dimensions is drawing increased attention and investment, but so far there have been no announcements about commercial 3D-IC chips. There are some fundamental problems that must be overcome and new tools that need to be developed. In contrast, the semiconductor industry is becoming fairly comfortable with 2.5D integration, where individual dies are assembled on some k... » read more

2023: A Good Year For Semiconductors


Looking back, 2023 has had more than its fair share of surprises, but who were the winners and losers? The good news is that by the end of the year, almost everyone was happy. That is not how we exited 2022, where there was overcapacity, inventories had built up in many parts of the industry, and few sectors — apart from data centers — were seeing much growth. The supposed new leaders we... » read more

3D-ICs May Be The Least-Cost Option


When 2.5D and 3D packaging were first conceived, the general consensus was that only the largest semiconductor houses would be able to afford them, but development costs are quickly coming under control. In some cases, these advanced packages actually may turn out to be the lowest-cost options. With stacked die [1], each die is considered to be a complete functional block or sub-system. In t... » read more

Heterogeneous Integration Finding Its Footing


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss heterogeneous integration with Dick Otte, president and CEO of Promex Industries; Mike Kelly, vice president of chiplets/FCBGA integration at Amkor Technology; Shekhar Kapoor, senior director of product management at Synopsys; John Park, product management group director in Cadence's Custom IC & PCB Group; and Tony Mastroianni, advanced packagin... » read more

Preparing For Commercial Chiplets


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the path to commercialization of chiplets with Saif Alam, vice president of engineering at Movellus; Tony Mastroianni, advanced packaging solutions director at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Mark Kuemerle, vice president of technology at Marvell; and Craig Bishop, CTO at Deca Technologies. What follows are excerpts of tha... » read more

Thermal Integrity Challenges Grow In 2.5D


Thermal integrity is becoming much harder to predict accurately in 2.5D and 3D-IC, creating a cascade of issues that can affect everything from how a system behaves to reliability in the field. Over the past decade, silicon interposer technology has evolved from a simple interconnect into a critical enabler for heterogeneous integration. Interposers today may contain tens of dies or chiplets... » read more

True 3D Is Much Tougher Than 2.5D


Creating real 3D designs is proving to be much more complex and difficult than 2.5D, requiring significant innovation in both technology and tools. While there has been much discussion about 3D designs, there are multiple interpretations about what 3D entails. This is more than just semantics, however, because each packaging option requires different design approaches and technologies. And a... » read more

The Race Toward Mixed-Foundry Chiplets


Creating chiplets with as much flexibility as possible has captured the imagination of the semiconductor ecosystem, but how heterogeneous integration of chiplets from different foundries will play out remains unclear. Many companies in the semiconductor ecosystem are still figuring out how they will fit into this heterogeneous chiplet world and what issues they will need to solve. While near... » read more

Improving Performance And Power With HBM3


HBM3 swings open the door to significantly faster data movement between memory and processors, reducing the power it takes to send and receive signals and boosting the performance of systems where high data throughput is required. But using this memory is expensive and complicated, and that likely will continue to be the case in the short term. High Bandwidth Memory 3 (HBM3) is the most rece... » read more

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