Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Susan Rambo, and Liz Allan The U.S. government will invest about $3 billion for the National Advanced Packaging Manufacturing Program (NAPMP), including an advanced packaging piloting facility to help U.S. manufacturers adopt new technology and workforce training programs. It also will provide funding for projects concentrating on materials and substrates; equipment, tools, ... » read more

Increasing AI Energy Efficiency With Compute In Memory


Skyrocketing AI compute workloads and fixed power budgets are forcing chip and system architects to take a much harder look at compute in memory (CIM), which until recently was considered little more than a science project. CIM solves two problems. First, it takes more energy to move data back and forth between memory and processor than to actually process it. And second, there is so much da... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Gregory Haley, and Liz Allan Bosch, Infineon, and NXP were cleared in Germany to each acquire 10% of the European Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (ESMC), established by TSMC, solidifying the supply chain against future shortages, particularly for automotive chips. “ESMC intends to build and operate another large semiconductor factory in Dresden, in which the three Europ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Susan Rambo, Gregory Haley, Jesse Allen, and Liz Allan President Biden issued an executive order on the “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” It says entities need to report large-scale computing clusters and the total computing power available, including “any model that was trained using a quantity of computing power greater than 1,026 inte... » read more

Gearing Up For Hybrid Bonding


Hybrid bonding is becoming the preferred approach to making heterogeneous integration work, as the semiconductor industry shifts its focus from 2D scaling to 3D scaling. By stacking chiplets vertically in direct wafer-to-wafer bonds, chipmakers can leapfrog attainable interconnection pitch from 35µm in copper micro-bumps to 10µm or less. That reduces signal delay to negligible levels and e... » read more

Chip Industry Talent Shortage Drives Academic Partnerships


Universities around the world are forming partnerships with semiconductor companies and governments to help fill open and future positions, to keep curricula current and relevant, and to update and expand skills for working engineers. Talent shortages repeatedly have been cited as the number one challenge for the chip industry. Behind those concerns are several key drivers, and many more dom... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Liz Allan, Jesse Allen, and Karen Heyman. Canon uncorked a nanoimprint lithography system, which the company said will be useful down to about the 5nm node. Unlike traditional lithography equipment, which projects a pattern onto a resist, nanoimprint directly transfers images onto substrates using a master stamp patterned by an e-beam system. The technology has a number of limitations and... » read more

Everyone’s A System Designer With Heterogeneous Integration


The move away from monolithic SoCs to heterogeneous chips and chiplets in a package is accelerating, setting in motion a broad shift in methodologies, collaborations, and design goals that are felt by engineers at every step of the flow, from design through manufacturing. Nearly every engineer is now working or touching some technology, process, or methodology that is new. And they are inter... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Jesse Allen, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) announced $238 million in awards toward establishing eight regional innovation hubs under the CHIPS and Science Act. The hubs aim to accelerate hardware prototyping and "lab-to-fab" transition of semiconductor technologies for secure edge/IoT, 5G/6G, AI hardware, quantum technology, electromagnetic warfare, and ... » read more

Sweeping Changes For Leading-Edge Chip Architectures


Chipmakers are utilizing both evolutionary and revolutionary technologies to achieve orders of magnitude improvements in performance at the same or lower power, signaling a fundamental shift from manufacturing-driven designs to those driven by semiconductor architects. In the past, most chips contained one or two leading-edge technologies, mostly to keep pace with the expected improvements i... » read more

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