Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade wars After opposing $34 billion in U.S. trade tariffs on behalf of the U.S. semiconductor manufacturing industry, Jonathan Davis, global vice president of industry advocacy at SEMI, recently spoke out against an additional $16 billion in duties on Chinese goods. The tariffs do little to address U.S. concerns over IP loss, according to SEMI. Over the past month, SEMI has also submitte... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade issues China and the United States are embroiled in a trade war. What is the impact? In testimony submitted to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) on the proposed tariffs on Chinese products, Consumer Technology Association (CTA) Vice President of International Trade Sage Chandler argues tariffs negatively impact businesses and consumers as well as fail to corr... » read more

Mixed Outlook For Semi Biz


Both the IC and fab equipment industries have been enjoying a boom cycle for some time, but they could be facing speed bumps and possibly turbulence in the second half of this year and into 2019. In the first half of 2018, the industry was fueled by the momentum carried over from 2017. DRAM prices remained relatively high, which contributed to the revenue growth in the overall IC industry. M... » read more

Everything You Need to Know about FDSOI Technology


Over the past decades, transistor feature size has continuously decreased, leading to an increase in performance and a reduction in power consumption. Consumers have reaped the benefits, with superior electronic devices that have become increasingly useful, valuable, faster and more efficient. In recent years, as transistor feature size has shrunk below 10nm, it has become progressively more di... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC has reduced its outlook for 2018 revenue and capital spending, according to Bloomberg. The company blamed the outlook on sluggish “mobile and digital currency mining demand,” according to the report. Samsung has developed the industry’s first 10nm-class 8-gigabit LPDDR5 DRAM. The 8Gb LPDDR5 boasts a data rate of up to 6,400 megabits-per-second (Mb/s), which is 1.5 tim... » read more

5nm Design Progress


Activity surrounding the 5nm manufacturing process node is quickly ramping, creating a better picture of the myriad and increasingly complex design issues that must be overcome. Progress at each new node after 28nm has required an increasingly tight partnership between the foundries, which are developing new processes and rule decks, along with EDA and IP vendors, which are adding tools, met... » read more

Bridges Vs. Interposers


The number of technology options continue to grow for advanced packaging, including new and different ways to incorporate so-called silicon bridges in products. For some time, Intel has offered a silicon bridge technology called Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB), which makes use of a tiny piece of silicon with routing layers that connects one chip to another in an IC package. In ... » read more

7nm Design Challenges


Ty Garibay, CTO at ArterisIP, talks about the challenges of moving to 7nm, who’s likely to head there, how long it will take to develop chips at that node, and why it will be so expensive. This also raises questions about whether chips will begin to disaggregate at 7nm and 5nm. https://youtu.be/ZqCAbH678GE » read more

The Week In Review: Design


Tools Synopsys revealed a power analysis solution for early SoC design as well as signoff-accurate power and reliability closure. PrimePower has reliability as a major focus, expanding power and reliability signoff and ECO closure capabilities from physical awareness to cell electromigration effects. Supported power types include peak power, average power, clock network power, leakage power, a... » read more

Materials, Magnetism & Quantum Physics


For the past half-century, chipmakers have been following the same roadmap for improving performance in chips and reducing the cost of chips. That has proven tremendously effective in reducing costs and packing computing into a smaller space, allowing people to carry around what used to be a multi-million-dollar mainframe in their pocket. That approach is beginning to lose momentum. It's ge... » read more

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