What Can Go Wrong In Heterogeneous Integration


Experts at the Table: 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 Mastroia... » read more

Designing Chips For Outer Space


If designing chips in cars sounds difficult, try designing them for space. There are huge temperature swings, and more radioactive particles than on Earth, which can cause single-event upsets, transients, functional interrupts, and latch-ups. A destructive latch-up can ruin a device, and in space that could transform an expensive piece of hardware into space junk. Ian Land, senior director for ... » read more

Looking Inside Of Chips


Shai Cohen, co-founder and CEO of proteanTecs, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to boost reliability and add resiliency into chips and advanced packaging. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Several years ago, no one was thinking about on-chip monitoring. What's changed? Cohen: Today it is obvious that a solution is needed for optimizing performanc... » read more

Bridging IC Design, Manufacturing, And In-Field Reliability


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about silicon lifecycle management and how that can potentially glue together design, manufacturing, and devices in the field, with Prashant Goteti, principal engineer at Intel; Rob Aitken, R&D fellow at Arm; Zoe Conroy, principal hardware engineer at Cisco; Subhasish Mitra, professor of electrical engineering and computer sci... » read more

Building Complex Chips That Last Longer


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about design challenges in advanced packages and nodes with John Lee, vice president and general manager for semiconductors at Ansys; Shankar Krishnamoorthy, general manager of Synopsys' Design Group; Simon Burke, distinguished engineer at Xilinx; and Andrew Kahng, professor of CSE and ECE at UC San Diego. This discussion was held at the Ansys IDEAS co... » read more

Designing Resilient Electronics


Electronic systems in automobiles, airplanes and other industrial applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and complex, required to perform an expanding list of functions while also becoming smaller and lighter. As a result, pressure is growing to design extremely high-performance chips with lower energy consumption and less sensitivity to harsh environmental conditions. If this ... » read more

Recent Earthquakes Highlight Risk To Semiconductor Manufacturing Sites


On July 4, 2019, southern California experienced a 6.4 magnitude earthquake followed by a 7.1 earthquake the next day. Both earthquakes occurred near the town of Ridgecrest, but they were not related to the San Andreas fault, an 800-mile fault zone in California where two tectonic plates meet. The San Andreas fault is generally considered to be where “the big one” could occur in California,... » read more

What Can Go Wrong In Automotive


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss automotive engineering with Jinesh Jain, supervisor for advanced architectures in Ford’s Research and Innovation Center in Palo Alto; Raed Shatara, market development for automotive infotainment at [getentity id="22331" comment="STMicroelectronics"]; Joe Hupcey, verification product technologist at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; ... » read more

Overcoming The Limits Of Scaling


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the increasing reliance on architectural choices for improvements in power, performance and area, with [getperson id="11425" comment=" Sundari Mitra"], CEO of [getentity id="22535" comment="NetSpeed Systems"]; Charlie Janac, chairman and CEO of [getentity id="22674" e_name="Arteris"]; [getperson id="11032" comment="Simon Davidmann"] CEO of [getentit... » read more

New Approaches For Reliability


The definition of reliability hasn’t budged since the invention of the IC, but how to achieve it is starting to change. In safety-critical systems, as well as in markets such as aerospace, demands for reliability are so rigorous that they often require redundant circuitry—and for good reason. A PanAmSat malfunction in 1998 caused by tin whisker growth wiped out pagers for 45 million use... » read more