Chip Industry Week In Review


Siemens announced plans to acquire Altair Engineering, a provider of industrial simulation and analysis, data science, and high-performance computing (HPC) software, for about $10 billion. Altair's software will become part of Siemens' Xcelerator portfolio and provide a boost to physics-based digital twins. Onto Innovation bought Lumina Instruments, a San Jose, California-based maker of lase... » read more

Research Bits: Sept. 24


Modeling negative capacitance Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed an open-source 3D simulation framework capable of modeling the atomistic origins of negative capacitance in ferroelectric thin films at the device level. When a material has negative capacitance, it can store a greater amount of electrical charge at lower voltages. The team believes the FerroX fra... » read more

Security Technical Paper Roundup: Aug. 27


A number of hardware security-related technical papers were presented at the August 2024 USENIX Security Symposium. The organization provides open access research, and the presentation slides and papers are free to the public. Topics include side-channel attacks and defenses, embedded security, fuzzing, fault injection, logic locking, Rowhammer, and more. Here are some highlights with associate... » read more

Digital Twins Find Their Footing In IC Manufacturing


Momentum is building for digital twins in semiconductor manufacturing, tying together the various processes and steps to improve efficiency and quality, and to enable more flexibility in the fab and assembly house. The movement toward digital twins opens up a slew of opportunities, from building and equipping new fabs faster to speeding yield ramps by reducing the number of silicon-based tes... » read more

Research Bits: June 25


Quantum on silicon Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) developed a platform to probe and control qubits in silicon for quantum networks, after an earlier discovery that defects in silicon could be used to send and store quantum information over widely used telecommunications wavelengths. The device uses an electric diode to manipulate... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Samsung unveiled its latest 2nm and 4nm process nodes, plus its AI solutions during the Samsung Foundry Forum. The company also introduced an aggressive roadmap for the next few years that includes 3D-ICs with logic-on-logic, starting in 2025; custom HBM with built-in logic; backside power delivery on 2nm technology in 2027; and co-packaged optics. In presentations at the event, the company als... » read more

Research Bits: May 28


Nanofluidic memristive neural networks Engineers from EPFL developed a functional nanofluidic memristive device that relies on ions, rather than electrons and holes, to compute and store data. “Memristors have already been used to build electronic neural networks, but our goal is to build a nanofluidic neural network that takes advantage of changes in ion concentrations, similar to living... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Absolics, an affiliate of Korea materials company SKC, will receive up to $75 million in direct funding under the U.S. CHIPS Act for the construction of a 120,000 square-foot facility in Covington, Georgia, for glass substrates in advanced packaging. imec will host a €2.5 billion (~$2.72B) pilot line for researching chips beyond 2nm, partially funded through the EU Chips Act. imec CEO Luc ... » read more

Chip Industry Technical Paper Roundup: April 2


New technical papers recently added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library. [table id=211 /] Find last week’s technical paper additions here. » read more

HW Implementation of Memristive ANNs


A new technical paper titled "Hardware implementation of memristor-based artificial neural networks" was published by KAUST, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, IBM Research, USC, University of Michigan and others. Abstract: "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently experiencing a bloom driven by deep learning (DL) techniques, which rely on networks of connected simple computing units oper... » read more

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