Keeping The Whole Package Cool


Heat dissipation is a critical issue for designers of complex chip-stacking and system-in-package devices. The amount of heat generated by a device increases as the number of transistors goes up, but the ability to dissipate the heat depends on the package surface area. Because the goal of 3D packaging is to squeeze more transistors into less overall space, new heat dissipation issues are em... » read more

System Bits: April 19


Debugging web apps MIT researchers reported that they’ve developed a system that can quickly comb through tens of thousands of lines of application code to find security flaws by exploiting some peculiarities of the Ruby on Rails web programming framework. The team said that in tests on 50 popular web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed sec... » read more

System Bits: March 1


Current generation silicon wafer While the single-crystal silicon wafer changed the nature of communication 60 years ago, a group of Cornell researchers is now hoping its work with quantum dot solids can usher in a new era in electronics. In what could be the first step toward discovering and developing artificial materials with controllable electronic structure, the team has fashioned 2D s... » read more

System Bits: Jan. 26


Precisely controlling graphene molecules Researchers at UCLA’s California NanoSystems Institute have found that in the same way gardeners may use sheets of plastic with strategically placed holes to allow plants to grow but keep weeds from taking root, the same basic approach can be applied in terms of placing molecules in the specific patterns they need within tiny nanoelectronic devices, w... » read more

Why Use A Package?


Subramanian Iyer, distinguished chancellor's professor in UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department—and a former fellow and director of the systems scaling technology department at IBM—sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the future of chip scaling. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Advanced packaging is being viewed as a way to extend scaling in the fut... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Jan. 5


A foggy consortium Scientists at Princeton University, ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, and Microsoft formed a global effort to develop architectures and tools to further "fog computing" and networks, which aim to harness connected devices' own computing, sensing and storage power to form edge networks that meet most of the demand of user devices that are at the periphery of a more centralized netwo... » read more

System Bits: Nov. 3


Quantum computer architecture Providing a blueprint to build the long-awaited, large-scale quantum computer, University of New South Wales (UNSW) and University of Melbourne researchers have designed a 3D silicon chip architecture based on single atom quantum bits that they said is compatible with atomic-scale fabrication techniques. Headquartered at UNSW, researchers from the Australian R... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 27


CD-SAXS makes progress For years, chipmakers have used metrology tools based on various optical techniques, such as scatterometry. But optical-based scatterometry may one day run out of steam, prompting the need for a possible replacement. One long-awaited candidate is called X-ray scattering. There are various flavors of X-ray scattering, including CD small-angle X-ray scattering (CD-SAXS)... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 6


Magnetic mass spectrometers The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) has developed a mass spectrometer, based on what the organization claims is the world’s highest field superconducting magnet. The instrument from National MagLab is called a Fourier transform ion cyclotron resonance (FT-ICR) mass spectrometer. The mass spectrometer boasts a 21 tesla magnet, which is ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 6


Portabella batteries Researchers at the University of California, Riverside created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious pu... » read more

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