Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs Intel continues to build more fabs. First, the company announced fabs in Arizona and then Ohio. Now, Intel plans to invest up to €80 billion in the European Union over the next decade. As part of the effort, Intel plans to build two semiconductor fabs in Magdeburg, Germany. Construction is expected to begin in the first half of 2023 and production planned to come online in 2... » read more

Week In Review: Auto, Security, Pervasive Computing


Automotive Supply chain issues and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, will constrain automotive production in 2022 by 2.6mn units, predicts S&P Global Mobility (formerly known as the automotive team at I.H.S. Markit). Ukraine controls around half of high purity neon gas used to etch ICs — the low supply of which may continue to hurt the automotive industry — and the country makes a cable ... » read more

The Great Resignation And The Microelectronics Industry: Retaining A Skilled Workforce


"Now hiring" signs are replacing masks and bottles of hand sanitizer as the ubiquitous markers of COVID-19, as the Great Resignation continues, and the Omicron surge ebbs. Everywhere – at fast food restaurants, at top tech companies – there are job openings, offering cash just for showing up at an interview, or up to $100,000 in sign-on bonuses. Consumers across all industries are bein... » read more

Blog Review: March 16


Ansys' Peter Hallschmid and Sandra Gely look at why, compared to rain and fog, snow is a different challenging environment for automotive sensors and how the random pattern of snowfall, properties of each flake, and the various distance between flakes play havoc on detecting objects. Siemens' Chuck Battikha focuses on how to protect against random hardware faults, the added costs of includin... » read more

Blog Review: March 9


Arm's Ajay Joshi investigates how to select the right benchmark for CPUs used in the Home device market, such as digital television and set-top box/over-the-top devices. Ansys' Jon Kordell checks out how reliability physics simulations and physical component characterization can support component swapping in high-reliability applications when the original part is unavailable due to supply ch... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Packaging ASE, AMD, Arm, Google, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC have announced the formation of a consortium that will establish a die-to-die interconnect standard and foster an open chiplet ecosystem. The founding companies also ratified the UCIe specification, an open industry standard developed to establish a standard interconnect at the package level. The UCIe 1.0 s... » read more

Blog Review: March 2


Arm's Charlotte Christopherson checks out SpiNNaker1, a project to develop a massively parallel, manycore supercomputer architecture that mimicked the interactions of biological neurons, and its follow up, SpiNNaker2, a hybrid system that combines statistical AI and neuromorphic computing. Cadence's Paul McLellan looks at open and generic PDKs that can be used by researchers and in education... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 23


Synopsys' Varun Agrawal looks at four new technologies have emerged to support the demands on 5G networks and applications, the challenges in validating all of those technologies together, and what's needed to perform end-to-end testing effectively for 5G O-RAN SoCs. Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi points to how FPGA retargeting could help address supply chain difficulties and some of the challenge... » read more

3D-IC: Great Opportunities, Great Challenges


The growing adoption of 2.5D and 3D integrated circuits (3D-ICs) marks a major inflection point in the world of semiconductor design. Electronic designers demand greater integration densities and faster data transfer rates to meet the growing performance requirements of AI/ML, 5G/6G networks and autonomous vehicles as these technologies have outpaced the capabilities of any single chip. 3D-IC t... » read more

Unsolved Issues In Next-Gen Photomasks


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss optical and EUV photomasks issues, as well as the challenges facing the mask business, with Naoya Hayashi, research fellow at DNP; Peter Buck, director of MPC & mask defect management at Siemens Digital Industries Software; Bryan Kasprowicz, senior director of technical strategy at Hoya; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. What f... » read more

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