Predicting The Future For Semiconductors


Is it possible to predict the future? Of course not. We all make projections of what happened in the past, where they are now, and the implications for the future. We bias that in various ways and think we are making some astounding revelation, which is highly unlikely to become true. Of course, by luck, some people get it right and they are bestowed with grand accolades and awards. The likelih... » read more

Chip Design CEO Outlook


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Joseph Sawicki, executive vice president for IC EDA at Siemens Digital Industries Software; John Kibarian, president and CEO of PDF Solutions; John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys' Semiconductor Business Unit; Niels Faché, vice president and general manager of PathWave Software Solutions at Keysight; Dean Drako, president and CEO of IC M... » read more

What Does 2023 Have In Store For Chip Design?


Predictions seem to be easier to make during times of stability, but they are no more correct than at any other period. During more turbulent times, fewer people are courageous enough to allow their opinions to be heard. And yet it is often those views that are more well thought through, and even if they turn out not to be true, they often contain some very enlightening ideas. 2022 saw some ... » read more

Collaboration Widens Among Big Chip Companies


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the growing need for collaboration among equipment and tools vendors, the impact of systems companies and increases in complexity, and how to handle a push for more customization while controlling costs, with Martin van den Brink, president and CTO of ASML; Luc Van den Hove, CEO of imec; David Fried, vice president of computati... » read more

The Path To Known Good Interconnects


Chiplets and heterogenous integration (HI) provide a compelling way to continue delivering improvements in performance, power, area, and cost (PPAC) as Moore’s Law slows, but choosing the best way to connect these devices so they behave in consistent and predictable ways is becoming a challenge as the number of options continues to grow. More possibilities also bring more potential interac... » read more

Designing For Multiple Die


Integrating multiple die or chiplets into a package is proving to be very different than putting them on the same die, where everything is developed at the same node using the same foundry process. As designs become more heterogeneous and disaggregated, they need to be modeled, properly floor-planned, verified, and debugged in the context of a system, rather than as individual components. Typi... » read more

Where All The Semiconductor Investments Are Going


Companies and countries are funneling huge sums of money into semiconductor manufacturing, materials, and research — at least a half-trillion dollars over the next decade, and maybe much more — to guarantee a steady supply of chips and know-how to support growth across a wide swath of increasingly data-centric industries. The build-out of a duplicate supply chain that can guarantee capac... » read more

Which Foundry Is In The Lead? It Depends.


The multi-billion-dollar race for foundry leadership is becoming more convoluted and complex, making it difficult to determine which company is in the lead at any time because there are so many factors that need to be weighed. This largely is a reflection of changes in the customer base at the leading edge and the push toward domain-specific designs. In the past, companies like Apple, Google... » read more

IC Architectures Shift As OEMs Narrow Their Focus


Diminishing returns from process scaling, coupled with pervasive connectedness and an exponential increase in data, are driving broad changes in how chips are designed, what they're expected to do, and how quickly they're supposed to do it. In the past, tradeoffs between performance, power, and cost were defined mostly by large OEMs within the confines of an industry-wide scaling roadmap. Ch... » read more

Big Changes In Architectures, Transistors, Materials


Chipmakers are gearing up for fundamental changes in architectures, materials, and basic structures like transistors and interconnects. The net result will be more process steps, increased complexity for each of those steps, and rising costs across the board. At the leading-edge, finFETs will run out of steam somewhere after the 3nm (30 angstrom) node. The three foundries still working at th... » read more

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