Where 5G Works, And Where It Doesn’t


The rollout of 5G hype has begun. Companies are building 5G chipsets for mobile devices, and they are working on the infrastructure that will allow massive amounts of data to move freely between devices. There is little doubt that more bandwidth is required everywhere. Files are growing in size, particularly with streaming video and images and various flavors of AI and machine learning. This... » read more

Power, Reliability And Security In Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsun... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Wing received an Air Carrier Certification from the Federal Aviation Administration to begin making commercial deliveries with drones. The Alphabet unit is cleared to deliver packages in southwestern Virginia. Wing has had a pilot program going in the vicinity of Canberra, Australia, and was recently permitted to make commercial deliveries with unmanned aerial vehicles in th... » read more

Gaps In 5G Test


Add one more industry to the long list that analysts expect 5G technology to disrupt—test. While the initial versions of this wireless technology will be little more than a faster version of 4G, concern is growing about exactly how to test the second phase of this technology, which will be based upon millimeter wave. A number of fundamental problems need to be addressed. Among them: T... » read more

System Bits: March 19


Nanomesh material could find use in sustainable applications Imec collaborated with KU Leuven to develop a nanomesh material made of a 3D structure with nanowires. This material could prove to make batteries more energy-efficient, while also improving catalytic converters and fuel cells, and making hydrogen production easier. The research team is touting the 3D nanometer-scale metal grid st... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 14


Optical memory Researchers at the University of Oxford, University of Exeter, and University of Münster propose an all-optical memory cell that can store more optical data, 5 bits, in a smaller space than was previously possible on-chip. The optical memory cell uses light to encode information in the phase change material Ge2Sb2Te5. A laser causes the material to change between ordered and... » read more

Panel Fan-out Ramps, Challenges Remain


After years of R&D, panel-level fan-out packaging is finally beginning to ramp up in the market, at least in limited volumes for a few vendors. However, panel-level fan-out, which is an advanced form of today’s fan-out packaging, still faces several technical and cost challenges to bring this technology into the mainstream or high-volume manufacturing. Moreover, several companies are d... » read more

Testing Millimeter Wave for 5G


By Susan Rambo and Ed Sperling The telecommunications world is hurtling toward 5G, but there is no consistency about how this next-gen wireless technology will be rolled out across various regions and plenty of unknowns about how it will be tested and how reliable it will be initially. A fair amount of confusion exists around what 5G constitutes in the first place. There is sub-6GHz 5G, w... » read more

Connected Cars: From Chip To City


As the automotive industry moves closer to autonomous vehicles, ecosystem players are focusing on the infrastructure pieces needed to make autonomous technology a reality for the first adopters, which are most likely commercial fleets. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I or v2i) is a communications model that allows vehicles to share information with the components that support a country's hi... » read more

Parametric Analysis, Design Guidelines for mm-Wave nm CMOS Transmission Lines


This paper focuses on nm CMOS transmission line design as distributed passive elements and their application in mm-wave integrated circuits. A variety of transmission lines such as coplanar waveguides (CPWs), shielded coplanar waveguides (SCPWs), and CPW with ground are analyzed in terms of their geometry and electrical properties. The parametric analysis of the various line types is based on a... » read more

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