Hybrid Bonding Moves Into The Fast Lane


The industry’s unquenchable thirst for I/O density and faster connections between chips, particularly logic and cache memory, is transforming system designs to include 3D architectures, and hybrid bonding has become an essential component in that equation. Hybrid bonding involves die-to-wafer or wafer-to-wafer connection of copper pads that carry power and signals and the surrounding diele... » read more

Week In Review, Manufacturing, Test


The U.S. is attempting to restrict sales of ASML’s deep ultra-violet (DUV) litho systems to China, according to a report from Bloomberg. The U.S. has been working to limit China's access to advanced technology for some time, and it has already limited sales of extreme ultra-violet (EUV), which is used to develop chips at the most advanced process nodes. DUV, in contrast, is used for older-nod... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Notes from the fabs Intel warned the “scope and pace" of the Ohio fab buildout could be impacted due to U.S. Congress’ inaction on funding the $52 billion CHIPS Act. The facility was announced in January with an initial phase investment of more than $20 billion with a larger expansion up to $100 billion over the next decade. The initial phase is not expected to be impacted, other than a de... » read more

High-NA EUV May Be Closer Than It Appears


High-NA EUV is on track to enable scaling down to the Angstrom level, setting the stage for chips with even higher transistor counts and a whole new wave of tools, materials, and system architectures. At the recent SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Mark Phillips, director of lithography hardware and solutions at Intel, reiterated the company’s intention to deploy the technology in high... » read more

Week in Review: Manufacturing, Test


Breaking the Logjam The U.S. government’s delay in funding strategic chip capacity is threatening supply chains that are critical to national security. In fact, classified meetings are being held this week on the subject. Meanwhile, recognizing that time is of the essence, a group of billionaires has backed the “America’s Frontier Fund,” a non-profit group that aims to spur U.S. chipma... » read more

Week in Review: Manufacturing, Test


Hybrid Bonding & Supercomputers At this week’s ECTC conference, CEA-Leti and Intel presented an “optimized hybrid direct-bonding, self-assembly process," which they claim has the potential to increase alignment accuracy and speed up fab throughput by several thousand dies per hour. The approach uses capillary forces of a water droplet to align dies on a target wafer. “Commercial s... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Broadcom announced it will acquire cloud computing and virtualization company VMware for about $61 billion in cash and stock, and assume $8 billion in VMware net debt. If all goes as planned, the Broadcom Software Group will rebrand and operate as VMware. “The combined solutions will enable customers, including leaders in all industry verticals, greater choice and flexibility to build, run, m... » read more

Technical Paper Round-up: May 17


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=27 /] Semiconductor Engineering is in the process of building this library of research papers. Please send suggestions (via comments section below) for what else you’d like us to incorporate. If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a go... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Deals AMD plans to purchase cloud startup Pensando for about US $1.9 billion. In a presentation at the SEMI ISS conference this week, AMD CTO Mark Papermaster described Pensando's technology as a "highly programmable packet-processing engine that allows you to speed up systems designed for the data center." Intel, Micron, Analog Devices and MITRE Engenuity formed an alliance to accelerate c... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


The U.S. Senate approved the 2022 America COMPETES act, which has big ramifications for the chip industry. The bill now heads to the House for further reconciliation. If approved, it would provide more than $50 billion in U.S. subsidies for semiconductor chip manufacturing. The SIAC (Semiconductor In America Coalition) urged Congress to act promptly to achieve a bipartisan compromise soon and o... » read more

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