A long-time evangelist of 3D integration technologies, Herb Reiter puts more than 20 years of experiences in technical and business roles at semiconductor and EDA companies to work, providing a holistic perspective and insight on how to bring 3D integration to the masses.
During the recent Applied Materials/SEMI Sustainability Forum, panelists touched on the fact that the big drivers of electronics — Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Facebook — are looking to cut carbon emissions across their supply chains. From a semiconductor perspective, this would include the energy and greenhouse gases used in...
October is a busy month as conferences go. ARM and Intel each held their virtual developer events focusing on the future of compute. IMAPS addressed packaging technology, and TSMC held its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) forum, also in late October. AMD followed up with an accelerated data center event in...
Sustainability is rapidly taking center stage in most industries; the electronics and semiconductors space included. The major players in the electronics’ space — Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook — have set aggressive carbon reduction goals for both themselves and their supply chain. These goals include having both themselves and...
The sustainability wave in the tech space is gaining momentum. Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft have all set very aggressive sustainability targets (Figure 1). Most of these companies are shooting for net-zero emissions by 2030, or at least have Scope 1 and 2 emissions at zero at that time....
Building integrated circuits (ICs) in the third dimension has been taking place since trench capacitors were introduced for DRAM in the 1980s. The trend continued with the introduction of the damascene process and copper, which quickly grew the back end of the line metallization from 2-3 layers into today’s interconnect...
Most semiconductor equipment companies have been focused on sustainability programs longer than most other industries. In part, some of the focus is probably due to customers, such as Intel and ST Microelectronics, that have had sustainability or environmental programs of some sort since 1993. In 2019, at the last face-to-face...
Day 2 of SEMI’s Innovation for a Transforming World featured the outlook on semiconductor market growth over the next 2-3 years. The pandemic to a certain extent has turned the semiconductor and the supporting markets on their head so to speak. After a strong 2018, 2019 saw slower growth. As...
Building a state-of-the-art integrated circuit takes a lot of resources. Water, energy, chemicals, gases, and silicon wafers are just a few of the key elements required to build a chip. According to Scotten W. Jones at IC Knowledge LLC, there are 600 to 800 process steps at 5nm depending on...
Day 1 In place of the SEMICON West in July, SEMI presented a virtual event titled Innovation for a Transforming World. The event format was a bit different than the way SEMI normally runs a conference. Historically, SEMI leans heavily on the semiconductor infrastructure for presentations with a keynote from...
Can semiconductors help with reducing the carbon footprint of bitcoin mining and other high-performance computing (HPC) applications? Can the overall compute power needed be reduced? These two questions were a common theme during several June and July industry conferences. The answer to the first question is a resounding “Yes!”, as...
