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Community Member Monthly Highlights — May

SEMI and TechSearch International announced that the global semiconductor packaging materials market is expected to reach US$29.8 billion by 2027, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.7% from the US$26.1 billion in revenue it logged in 2022, in their new Global Semiconductor Packaging Materials Outlook report. High-performance applications, 5G, artificial intelligence...

diverse workforce

Hiring and Retaining a Diverse Workforce

The CHIPS and Science Act aims to bring semiconductor research & development and manufacturing back to U.S. soil. Not only will this make the U.S. less reliant on the international supply chain, but it is estimated that this investment in onshore semiconductor and research facilities will create over half a...

The Rise of Organic and Glass Substrates

If you are designing a heterogeneously integrated, multi-die, high-performance device for markets such as HPC, AI, data centers, etc., then the silicon interposer is probably the platform of choice. Yes, it comes at a cost, and generally requires expensive silicon place-and-route (P&R) tools, along with workflows for implementation. With the...

2023 ECTC Community Member Preview

Wow, wow, wow, 3D InCites community members are going to be well represented at next week’s Electronics Components Technology Conference (ECTC) in Orlando. I have counted 24 companies with booths, and even more presenting papers. It’s going to be the best three days in packaging, components, and microelectronic systems science,...

Hybrid Bonding takes Heterogeneous Integration to the Next Level

Hybrid bonding enables an assortment of possible chip architectures, mainly targeted at high-end applications including high-performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence (AI), servers, and data centers. As the technology matures, further growth is projected into consumer applications, memory devices including high bandwidth memory (HBM), and mobile and automotive applications that could...

A Career in Microelectronics Through the Eyes of Bill Chen

The semiconductor and microelectronics industries are in the midst of a workforce crisis created by, among other things, the combination of explosive growth and a maturing workforce. Competition for STEM talent in other industries has made it difficult to recruit the latest generation of graduates, who are lured by seemingly...

IFTLE 556: Is Chiplet Partitioning a New IC Design Paradigm?

While most of us in advanced packaging is familiar with CEA-Leti, CEA-List ( Laboratoire d’Intégration de Systèmes et des technologies) is one of three specialized technological research institutes of CEA  specializing in digital systems. Denis Dutoit, of CEA-List, presentation on “Chiplet Partitioning Can Balance Among Performance, Flexibility and Scalability” at...

The Convergence of Technology Nodes

The photo of my May calendar was a picture of a 1956 RAMAC computer with a whopping five megabytes of storage. The note on my calendar states that it could hold the entire phone book of Manhattan. The photo made me think of recent technology announcements, the announcements yet to...

Building a Chiplet Ecosystem

The semiconductor industry’s decades-long adherence to Moore’s Law doctrine of doubling transistor counts on monolithic devices every 18 – 24 months has been amazingly successful. It’s now possible to integrate tens of billions of transistors onto a monolithic die whose area may be hundreds of square millimeters. The resulting chips...

IFTLE 555: A Closer Look at The Chiplet Market

IFTLE has been updating our readers on the chiplet market and the technology since I served as subject matter expert (SME) for DARPA’s Dan Green who gets credit for developing the CHIPS program (Common Heterogeneous Integration and IP Reuse Strategies) in 2017. At that time the average packaging engineer couldn’t...

A Look at the Next Generation of Packaging Inspection Solutions

With the increasing expectations and demands of customers of electronic equipment, the manufacturing technologies applied are also propelled due to rising requirements. Powerful wearables, the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile communication devices, and new huge data storage subsystems push the semiconductor industry and the electronics designers to new heights, and...

Community Member Monthly Highlights – April 2023

Cadence, ASE Group, and Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU) announced collaboration on an education and training program to cultivate talent for 3D-IC Design. Cadence collaborates with universities on system packaging education and talent development through the Cadence Academic Network program, which provides students with access to Cadence advanced IC packaging...

3D InCites: A New Chapter

14 years ago, I had an idea to create a content platform devoted to the advancement of semiconductor 3D Integration technologies. I called it 3D InCites because to “incite” means to “stir up interest in”. I also liked the play on 3D IC. I started attending industry events and blogging...

Heterogeneous IC packaging

Heterogeneous IC Packaging: Building an Infrastructure

Heterogeneous IC packaging is here. It is already in production, and increasingly more customers are developing and qualifying their products at Amkor and in other outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) suppliers and foundry providers. The rationale for this surge into new multi-die embodiments has been well documented and discussed....