Smart Manufacturing Makes Gains In Chip Industry


Lights out manufacturing is gaining steam across the semiconductor industry, accelerating productivity, improving quality, and reducing costs and environment impact. These benefits are the result of years of strategic investments in technologies like machine-to-machine communication, data analytics, and robotics to achieve higher levels of autonomy. Semiconductor factories have long depen... » read more

A New Class Of Actuators Mimicking Human Muscle


Developing robots with human-like muscles that produce autonomous movement is not possible using traditional rigid, high-voltage electronics. However, recent research funded by FlexTech, a SEMI Technology community, shows promise in incorporating microcircuits to do just that by directly controlling and operating HASEL actuators. The innovation could guide intelligent, goal-oriented robots in ... » read more

Machine Vision Plus AI/ML Adds Vast New Opportunities


Traditional technology companies and startups are racing to combine machine vision with AI/ML, enabling it to "see" far more than just pixel data from sensors, and opening up new opportunities across a wide swath of applications. In recent years, startups have been able to raise billions of dollars as new MV ideas come to light in markets ranging from transportation and manufacturing to heal... » read more

Smarter Ways To Manufacture Chips


OSAT and wafer fabs are beginning to invest in Industry 4.0 solutions in order to improve efficiency and reduce operating costs, but it's a complicated process that involves setting up frameworks to evaluate different options and goals. Semiconductor manufacturing facilities have relied on dedicated automation teams for decades. These teams track and schedule chip production, respond to equi... » read more

Research Bits: April 10


Meminductor identified Researchers at Texas A&M University identified the meminductor circuit unit. Similar to the memristor and the memcapacitor, a meminductor has a memory-like nature where its properties are dependent on previous values. The resistor, capacitor, and inductor comprise the three classical circuit elements. The memristor and the memcapacitor, while earlier theorized, ha... » read more

Research Bits: Dec. 20


Patch tracks blood in deep tissue A skin-worn photoacoustic patch developed by a research team at the University of California San Diego is equipped with arrays of laser diodes and piezoelectric transducers to detect biomolecules in deep tissues, which usually would require a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and X-ray-computed tomography. The patch may help doctors tract hemoglobin in real tim... » read more

Improving Chip Efficiency, Reliability, And Adaptability


Peter Schneider, director of Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits' Engineering of Adaptive Systems Division, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about new models and approaches for ensuring the integrity and responsiveness of systems, and how this can be done within a given power budget and at various speeds. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Where are y... » read more

HW Accelerator Architecture for MI Computation With Low Latency, Energy Efficient (MIT)


A new technical paper titled "Efficient Computation of Map-scale Continuous Mutual Information on Chip in Real Time" was published by researchers at MIT. Find the technical paper here. "In this paper, we introduce a new hardware accelerator architecture for MI computation that features a low-latency, energy-efficient MI compute core and an optimized memory subsystem that provides sufficie... » read more

Mass Production of Soft And Stretchable Electronics


This new technical paper titled "Scalable Manufacturing of Liquid Metal Circuits" was published by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University. The work presents "a novel technique for scalable and reproducible manufacturing of LM-based SSEs [soft and stretchable electronics] with integrated solid-state microelectronic components. The manufacturing technique is based on a selective metal-alloy... » read more

Robots Need More Human Skills


Robots need freedom. At least if they are working intelligently with humans. Out of the cage, into the open shop floor of a factory. However, with freedom, great challenges await robots, which previously only knew their small world behind protective grids and their highly specialized activities. Here they have to cope with humans who are vulnerable, sometimes unpredictable, but in any case al... » read more

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