For decades now I’ve watched the incredible growth of SoCs in terms of die size, transistor count, frequency and complexity. Instead of placing all of the system complexity into a single, monolithic chip, there are now compelling reasons to use a multi-chip approach, like when the maximum die size limit is reached, or it’s… Read More
Alphawave Semi Showcases 3nm Connectivity Solutions and Chiplet-Enabled Platforms for High Performance Data Center Applications
There were quite a few announcements at the TSMC Technical Symposium last week but the most important, in my opinion, were based on TSMC N3 tape-outs. Not only is N3 the leading 3nm process it is the only one in mass production which is why all of the top tier semiconductor companies are using it. TSMC N3 will be the most successful node… Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 5
TSMC also covered manufacturing excellence. The TSMC “Trusted Foundry” tagline has many aspects to it, but manufacturing is a critical one. TSMC is the foundry capacity leader but there is a lot more to manufacturing as you will read here. Which brings us to the manufacturing accomplishments from the briefing:
To
… Read MoreTSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 4
TSMC covered their specialty technologies in great detail. Specialty is what we inside the ecosystem used to call weird stuff meaning non-mainstream and fairly difficult to do on leading edge processes. Specialty technologies will play an even more important part of semiconductor design with the advent of chiplets where die… Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 3
TSMC’s 3DFabric initiative was a big focus at the symposium, as it should be. I remember when TSMC first went public with CoWos the semiconductor ecosystem, including yours truly, let out a collective sigh wondering why TSMC is venturing into the comparatively low margin world of packaging. Now we know why and it is absolutely… Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 2
The next topic I would like to cover is an update to the TSMC process node roadmap starting with N3. As predicted, N3 will be the most successful node in the TSMC FinFET family. The first version of N3 went into production at the end of last year (Apple) and will roll out with other customers in 2023. There is a reported record amount of … Read More
TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium Overview Part 1
The TSMC 2023 North America Technology Symposium happened today so I wanted to start writing about it as there is a lot to cover. I will do summaries and other bloggers will do more in-depth coverage on the technology side in the coming weeks. Having worked in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem the majority of my 40 year semiconductor… Read More
TSMC has spent a lot more money on 300mm than you think
Up until November of 2022, IC Knowledge LLC was an independent company and had become the world leader in cost and price modeling of semiconductors. In November 2022 TechInsights acquired IC Knowledge LLC and IC Knowledge LLC is now a TechInsights company.
For many years, IC Knowledge has published a database tracking all the 300mm… Read More
3DIC Physical Verification, Siemens EDA and TSMC
At SemiWiki we’ve written four times now about how TSMC is standardizing on a 3DIC physical flow with their approach called 3Dblox, so I watched a presentation from John Ferguson of Siemens EDA to see how their tool flow supports this with the Calibre tools. With a chiplet-based packaging flow there are new physical verification… Read More
Advances in Physical Verification and Thermal Modeling of 3DICs
If, like me, you’ve been paying too little attention to historically less glamorous areas of chip design like packaging, you’ll wake up one day and realize just how much things have changed and continue to advance and how interesting it’s become.
One of the main drivers here is the increasing use of chiplets to counter the decreasing… Read More