SCALES
Florida Semiconductor Week, Jan. 23–25 in Gainesville, brought together nearly 300 luminaries in the world of semiconductor manufacturing and research to discuss the state-of-the-art in advanced packaging, advanced semiconductor design, and fabrication.
The days of monolithic chips developed at the most advanced process nodes are rapidly dwindling. Nearly everyone working at the leading edge of design is looking toward some type of advanced packaging using discrete heterogeneous components.
The challenge now is how to shift the whole chip industry into this disaggregated model.
The U.S. share of chip design revenue will drop to 36 percent by the end of this decade from 46 percent in 2021 and over 50 percent in 2015, without government support, according an analysis by U.S. industry body Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) and Boston Consulting Group.
In 2011, the price of Gold (Au) surged to $1900/oz which had a drastic impact on Wirebonded ICs using Au wires. IC suppliers scrambled to convert from Au to copper (Cu) wire on as many products as they could. However, automotive ICs were reluctant to make the jump due to lack of reliability data and performance track-record. However, today’s automotive ICs are big users of Cu wires driven by cost and reliability considerations.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said on Tuesday at a company launch event that Moore’s Law, a rule of thumb from Intel’s founder dating back to the 1960s, is “alive and well.” The theory, posited by Gordon Moore, implies that chips will continue to get faster and cheaper at a predictable rate.
One of the key challenges on the security side is clarifying exactly what you’re testing for. While a chip may have been manufactured to detailed specifications, its security has to be assessed through the mindset of a smart and determined attacker rather than through predictable metrics.
Korea is moving to become a hub for the semiconductor industry, as global chip companies are building their facilities here one after another. As part of its efforts, ASML, the Netherlands-based semiconductor equipment maker, held a groundbreaking ceremony to build its facility in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, Wednesday.
ECE Assistant Professor (and budding social media star) Navid Asadi’s 12-part video series, ‘Physical Assurance and Inspection of Electronics,’ recently surpassed 100k views.
By crunching through the massive amounts of data being generated by today’s supply chains, AI can predict a range of unexpected events, such as weather conductions, transportation bottlenecks, and labor strikes, helping to anticipate problems and reroute shipments around them.
White light interferometry and other optical approaches can help detect defects in advanced packages. Stacking chips is making it far more difficult to find existing and latent defects, and to check for things like for things like die shift, leftover particles from other processes, co-planarity of bumps, and adhesion of different materials such as dielectrics.