Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Here comes the battle between 5nm and 6nm processes at two foundry vendors—Samsung and TSMC. Meanwhile, Intel is behind and scrambling to get 10nm out the door. (Intel's 10nm is equivalent to 7nm from the foundries.) Last week, TSMC announced delivery of a complete version of its 5nm design infrastructure. TSMC’s 5nm technology is based on a finFET. This week, Samsung anno... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Combining artificial intelligence with unmanned aerial vehicles could provide a quicker and safer alternative to inspecting roadways for cracks, potholes, and other damage, according to a paper posted on arvix.org. “[M]anual visual inspection [is] not only tedious, time-consuming, and costly, but also dangerous for the personnel. Furthermore, the detection results are alwa... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Intel acquired vision and video FPGA IP company Omnitek. Founded in 1998, the Basingstoke, England-based company has produced FPGA IP cores for video processing including conversion and enhancement, creating arbitrary image warps on a real time video stream, connectivity, and deep learning and AI inferencing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Qualcomm and Apple have dropped all litigatio... » read more

Moore’s Law Now Requires Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsung. W... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fab tools ASML said it has disagreed with any implication that it has been a victim of “Chinese espionage,” as stated in an article in a Dutch newspaper. The article discusses the results of a public court case in the United States that ASML won last year. In the case, XTAL was found by a jury to have misappropriated ASML’s confidential and proprietary information as well as trade secret... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Organizers for the Internet of Things World 2019 conference, coming up on May 13-16 in Santa Clara, Calif., surveyed more than 100 IoT leaders in various industries. Implementation (34%) and security (25%) were the highest concerns for the respondents. Those were followed by initial purchase (17%), scalability (10%), business buy-in (8%), and upkeep costs (3%). Two-thirds of... » read more

Single Vs. Multi-Patterning EUV


Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography finally is moving into production, but foundry customers now must decide whether to implement their designs using EUV-based single patterning at 7nm, or whether to wait and instead deploy EUV multiple patterning at 5nm. Each patterning scheme has unique challenges, making that decision more difficult than it might appear. Targeted for 7nm, single pattern... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TrendForce released its foundry rankings for the first quarter of 2019. TSMC is still the clear leader, followed in order by Samsung, GlobalFoundries and UMC, according to the firm. It was a tough quarter for all foundries. Samsung has rolled out its new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2E) product. The new solution, called Flashbolt, is the industry’s first HBM2E to deliver a 3.2Gbps... » read more

Making Chip Packaging Simpler


Packaging is emerging as one of the most critical elements in semiconductor design, but it's also proving difficult to master both technically and economically. The original role of packaging was simply to protect the chips inside, and there are still packages that do just that. But at advanced nodes, and with the integration of heterogeneous components built using different manufacturing pr... » read more

Week in Review: IoT, Security, Auto


Internet of Things Apple purchased a portfolio of eight granted and pending patents that belonged to Lighthouse AI, a smart home security camera startup that ceased operations near the end of 2018. The portfolio was acquired at about the same time, according to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; financial terms weren’t revealed. Also not disclosed, as usual, is what Apple will do with t... » read more

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