Chip Industry Week In Review


Computex in Taiwan: Arm and Nvidia introduced an AI PC platform, RTX Spark, with an Arm-based Grace CPU, Blackwell RTX GPU, and unified memory. Cadence announced a fully autonomous virtual agentic AI design engineer, enabling customers to run dynamic simulations in automated workflows. Intel launched Xeon 6+, its first data-center CPU built on Intel Foundry's 18A process. The company... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: Jun. 2


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: Technical Paper Research Organizations Physical Foundation Models: Fixed HW implementations of large-scale neural networks 🔗 Yale University, Cornell University, Boston University, NTT Research Understanding Inference Scaling for LLMs: Bottlenecks, Trade-offs, and Performance Princip... » read more

Low-Temp Solders Are Suddenly Critical For Chiplets And Photonics


Key Takeaways: Tin-bismuth-based solders enable reduced warpage and compatibility with silicon photonics and other temperature-sensitive components. A novel soldering process using white light could help prevent cracks in flip-chip BGA package solder balls, while reducing the carbon footprint. Hypoeutectic Sn-Bi based solders prove especially promising as an SAC305 replacement. ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Deals Marvell acquired Polariton Technologies, a Swiss developer of plasmonics-based silicon photonics devices. Onto Innovation is partnering with Rigaku, combining Onto’s analysis software with Rigaku’s CD-SAXS platform for advanced semiconductor process control. Onto also agreed to acquire a 27% stake in Rigaku for about $710M. Tesla plans to use Intel’s 14A process for its T... » read more

Cryogenic Etch: A Key Enabler Of 3D NAND


Increased storage needs at the edge and in the cloud are fueling rising demand for higher-capacity flash memory across multiple applications. Released every 12 to 18 months, 3D NAND scaling outpaces most other semiconductor devices in replacement rate and performance gains. With each new generation, NAND suppliers deliver 50% faster read/write speeds, 40% greater bit density, lower latency, ... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Retaliations and countermoves leading up to planned trade talks between the U.S. and China led experts to wonder, 'Who's winning?' New activity on this front: China issued questionnaires to some U.S. semiconductor firms as part of an anti-dumping probe, demanding detailed data on sales, profit margins, logistics costs and Chinese customer names for analog chips. The probe appears aimed at ... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: August 19


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library: [table id=465 /] Find more semiconductor research papers here. » read more

Scaling DRAM Technology To Meet Future Demands: Challenges And Opportunities


Since the invention of the 1T1C bit cell more than 50 years ago, DRAMs have become the main memory of choice for processors in computer systems and many consumer electronics devices. As new use computing paradigms have been created, including 3D graphics, cloud computing, smart phones, and AI processing, specialized processors and DRAM memories have been developed that are optimized for these u... » read more

In-NAND Self-Encryption Architecture In A 4D-NAND Structure (DGIST, Georgia Tech Et Al.)


A new technical paper titled "FlashVault: Versatile In-NAND Self-Encryption with Zero Area Overhead" was published by researchers at DGIST, Georgia Tech, POSTECH, Samsung Electronics, Virginia Tech, and Korea University. Abstract "We present FlashVault, an in-NAND self-encryption architecture that embeds a reconfigurable cryptographic engine into the unused silicon area of a state-of-the-ar... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Updated for 12/20 government fundings and 12/23 for China trade investigation announcements. President Biden announced a trade investigation into "China's unfair trade practices in the semiconductor sector."  The announcement stated "PRC semiconductors often enter the U.S. market as a component of finished goods. This Section 301 investigation will examine a broad range of the PRC’s non-m... » read more

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