China: Strong Market Growth And Innovation In Packaging


By Shanshan Du Since the mid-1980s, packaging and assembly have been key segments of the semiconductor supply chain in China. In the past decade, the fast growing market of electronic product manufacturing in China occurred concurrently with the innovation and growth in China for packaging and assembly. SEMI China researched the packaging and assembly industry segment and observed a total... » read more

Inside The OSAT Business


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the IC-packaging industry, foundries, China and other topics with Tien Wu, chief operating officer at Taiwan's Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), the world's largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) vendor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What is your overall outlook for 2016? Wu: Last year, the semi... » read more

Tech Talk: 2.5D Issues


Bill Isaacson, director of ASIC marketing at eSilicon, about how viable this packaging approach is, organic vs. inorganic interposers, where the problems are, thermal coupling, interposer cost, and what will change over the next couple years. » read more

The Big Shift


The number of chipmakers that truly can differentiate their products by moving to the next process node is falling, and that pool will continue to shrink even further over the next few years. Processor companies such as Intel and IBM always will benefit from scaling and architectural changes. So will GPU companies such as Nvidia, and FPGA vendors such as Xilinx, Microsemi and Altera (now par... » read more

Why Use A Package?


Subramanian Iyer, distinguished chancellor's professor in UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department—and a former fellow and director of the systems scaling technology department at IBM—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the future of chip scaling. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Advanced packaging is being viewed as a way to extend scaling in the fut... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 20


How far can you go on solar power? 493 million miles, at least if you're the Juno spacecraft. Plus, winemaking gets a boost from submarine technology, in this week's top tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark. Mentor's Steve Pateras digs into how automotive ICs bring a whole new set of requirements that are driving the evolution of memory BIST. If you're interested in neural networks and ... » read more

Executive Insight: Sehat Sutardja


Sehat Sutardja, chairman and CEO of Marvell, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new approaches for design and memory and why costs and time to market are forcing changes in Moore's Law. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What was behind your move into modular packaging? Sutardja: The cost of building chips is getting out of hand. As we make things more ... » read more

Rise Of The Old Fab


Growth in the [getkc id="260" comment="Internet of Everything"], along with the beginning of a shift toward systems in package, are creating buzz in a rather unlikely place—established and well-worn process nodes where equipment is scarce, semi-functional, and difficult to maintain. In the past, moving to the next node was a sign of progress, leaving behind the trailing edge of designs to ... » read more

How To Choose A Processor


Choosing a processor might seem straightforward at first glance, but like many engineering challenges it's harder than it looks. When is a CPU better than a GPU, MCU, DSP or other type of processor? And for what design—or part of a design? For decades, the CPU has been the default choice. “It is deliberately designed to be pretty efficient at all tasks, is straightforward to program, ... » read more

Reflections On 2015


It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with Semiconductor Engineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the "Pants-On-Fire" meter may be applicable to politicians, we ... » read more

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