Power/Performance Bits: Sept. 1


Growing graphene nanoribbons University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers discovered a way to grow graphene nanoribbons with desirable semiconducting properties directly on a conventional germanium semiconductor wafer. This could allow manufacturers to easily use graphene nanoribbons in hybrid integrated circuits, which promise to significantly boost the performance of next-generation electroni... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


NuFlare Technology wants to enter a new market. The e-beam giant and NGR are jointly collaborating on a development program for next-generation electron-beam wafer inspection and metrology. It’s unclear if NuFlare is developing a single- or multi-beam tool, however. Don’t look now, but a fab tool downturn could be on the horizon. This comes amid a slowdown in PCs, tablets and smartphone... » read more

Getting Paid More


Consolidation is a regular news item in the semiconductor industry, and has been for years, but most of those deals have been relatively small. What's changing is the amount of consolidation involving big companies, fueled partly by a massive M&A fund in China, partly by an arms race in preparation for the IoE, and partly by the kind of thinking that if other companies are doing it, it's dan... » read more

Software Driving More Hardware Designs


The influence of software engineers is growing inside of chip and systems companies, reversing a decades-old trend of matching the software to the fastest or most power-efficient hardware and raising as-yet unanswered questions about what will change in SoC design. The shift is particularly evident in chips developed for high-volume markets such as mobile phones and tablets. It's also happen... » read more

Electronics Butterfly Effect


Everyone has heard of the butterfly effect where a small change in a non-linear system can result in large difference in an outcome. For the past 40 years, the electronics industry has approximated a linear system, fed primarily by Moore’s Law. The incremental changes available at each new process node have led us to make incremental changes and improvements in many aspects of the design, its... » read more

Advanced IC Packaging Biz Heats Up


After a number of false starts and lackluster adoption, the advanced IC packaging market is finally heating up. On one front, for example, a new wave of chips based on advanced [getkc id="82" kc_name="2.5D"]/[getkc id="42" kc_name="3D"] stacked-die is entering the market. And on another front, the momentum is building for new and advanced 2D packages, such as embedded package-on-package (PoP... » read more

Inside The 5G Smartphone


Amid a slowdown in the cell phone business, the market is heating up for perhaps the next big thing in wireless—5th generation mobile networks or 5G. In fact, major carriers, chipmakers and telecom equipment vendors are all rushing to get a piece of the action in 5G, which is the follow-on to the current wireless standard known as 4G or long-term evolution (LTE). Intel, Samsung and Qualcom... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Sunit Rikhi, vice president of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel and general manager of Intel’s Custom Foundry unit, has retired. “I left Intel on a sabbatical in late March and ended my career with Intel on June 1,” Rikhi said in an e-mail. Now, Rikhi has started a new company. The company, called Reach for Infinity LLC, “is a management development company devoted to... » read more

2.5D Creeps Into SoC Designs


A decade ago top chipmakers predicted that the next frontier for SoC architectures would be the z axis, adding a third dimension to improve throughput and performance, reduce congestion around memories, and reduce the amount of energy needed to drive signals. The obvious market for this was applications processors for mobile devices, and the first companies to jump on the stacked die bandwag... » read more

How Long Will FinFETs Last?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss how long FinFETs will last and where we will we go next with Vassilios Gerousis, Distinguished Engineer at [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]; Juan Rey, Sr. Director of Engineering for Calibre R&D at [getentity id="22017" e_name="Mentor Graphics"]; Kelvin Low, Senior Director Foundry Marketing at [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"]; and Vic... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →