Chip Industry Week In Review


Chinese firms imported almost $26 billion worth of chipmaking machinery, according to fresh trade data released by China’s General Administration of Customs this week, Bloomberg reports. Meanwhile, the global semiconductor manufacturing industry continued to show signs of improvement in Q2 2024 with significant growth of IC sales, stabilizing capital expenditure, and an increase in install... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 21


Cadence's Reela Samuel explores the critical role of PCIe 6.0 equalization in maintaining signal integrity and solutions to mitigate verification challenges, such as creating checkers to verify all symbols of TS0, ensuring the correct functioning of scrambling, and monitoring phase and LTSSM state transitions. Siemens' John McMillan introduces an advanced packaging flow for Intel's Embedded ... » read more

Building Smarter, Better Fabs


Battling labor shortages, faster ramp rates, and data overload, the process of designing and building greenfield fabs requires a combination of tech tools, failing earlier approaches and superior planning from day one. The complexity and scale of semiconductor fabs is skyrocketing as is the capital cost. Chipmakers are looking to ramp multibillion dollar fabs faster despite the hurdles of la... » read more

Why Small Fab And Assembly Houses Are Thriving


High-volume products get more than their fair share of attention in the semiconductor world, but most chips don't fit into that category. While a few huge fabs and offshore assembly and test (OSAT) houses process enormous volumes of chips, small fabs and packaging lines serve for lower volumes, specialized technology, and prototyping. “There are companies that run literally one lot of 25 w... » read more

Securing Supply Chains At SEMICON West 2024


Jose Fernandez, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment, sat down with Joe Stockunas, President of SEMI Americas, for a fireside chat on the CEO Summit keynote stage at SEMICON West 2024. In the Securing Critical Supply Chains for the 21st Century discussion, Fernandez emphasized the need to form partnerships to address vulnerabilities as the key to cre... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 14


Cadence's Dimitry Pavlovsky highlights two new features in the AMBA CHI protocol Issue G update that enhance security of the Arm architecture: Memory Encryption Contexts, which allows data in each Realm in the memory to be encrypted with a different encryption key, and Device Assignment, which introduces hardware provisions to support fully coherent caches in partially trusted remote coherent d... » read more

Blog Review: Aug. 7


Synopsys' Jyotika Athavale and Randy Fish investigate the problem of silent data corruption caused by difficult-to-detect hardware defects that cause unnoticed errors in the data being processed and is becoming an increasingly pressing problem as computing scales massively at a rapid pace with the demands of AI. Siemens' Keith Felton suggests adopting physical design reuse circuits to provid... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology proposed a new EUV litho technology using only four reflective mirrors and a new method of illumination optics that it claims will use 1/10 the power and cost half as much as existing EUV technology from ASML. Applied Materials may not receive expected U.S. funding to build a $4 billion research facility in Sunnyvale, CA, due to internal government... » read more

Blog Review: July 31


Cadence's Jasmine Makhija explains how to boost the performance of CXL 3.0 by using NOP (No Operation) Insertion Hints in latency-optimized 256B Flit Mode, which enables the system to quickly revert to the low-latency path after temporarily switching to a higher-latency path due to error correction needs. Synopsys' Robert Fey finds that by automatically and dynamically linking requirements a... » read more

Building A Sustainable And Diverse Semiconductor Workforce: Insights From ASMC 2024 Panel Discussion


As the semiconductor industry works to attract talent to overcome its labor shortage, governments, educators, and the private sector must collaborate to make industry career opportunities more accessible for prospective employees. This concept provided the framework for a panel discussion during SEMI’s 35th annual Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) that took place in Alba... » read more

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