The topic of chiplets is getting a lot of attention these days. The chiplet movement has picked up more momentum since Moore’s law started slowing down as process technology approached 5nm. With the development cost of a monolithic SoC crossing the $500M and wafer yields of large die-based chips dropping steeply, the decision … Read More
Tag: cowos
Semiconductor Packaging History and Primer
From DIP to Advanced, semiconductor packaging has become strategic
For ease of reading – I am going to be splitting this primer into two parts. First is the technical overview of everything. Next will be the company-specific writeups that follow over time – specifically Teradyne, Formfactor, Advantest, and Camtek
Semiconductor Capital Equipment Series: Introduction
Semicap is in some ways the unsung hero of American global dominance in semiconductors. The US punches above its weight in terms of market share compared to demand, but specifically in three categories. EDA, IP, and Equipment.
I hope to write about everything there can be said about semiconductors, and EDA is a place I understand… Read More
Advanced 2.5D/3D Packaging Roadmap
Frequent SemiWiki readers are no doubt familiar with the advances in packaging technology introduced over the past decade. At the recent International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, TSMC gave an insightful presentation sharing their vision for packaging roadmap goals and challenges, to address the growing… Read More
Update on TSMC’s 3D Fabric Technology
TSMC recently held their 10th annual Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum. An earlier article summarized the highlights of the keynote presentation from L.C. Lu, TSMC Fellow and Vice-President, Design and Technology Platform, entitled “TSMC and Its Ecosystem for Innovation” (link).
Overview of 3D Fabric
The TSMC… Read More
Highlights of the TSMC Technology Symposium 2021 – Packaging
The recent TSMC Technology Symposium provided several announcements relative to their advanced packaging offerings.
General
3DFabricTM
Last year, TSMC merged their 2.5D and 3D package offerings into a single, encompassing brand – 3DFabric.
2.5D package technology – CoWoS
The 2.5D packaging options are divided into the CoWoS… Read More
Maximizing ASIC Performance through Post-GDSII Backend Services
ASICs by definition are designed to meet the respective applications’ requirements. ASIC engineers deploy various design techniques to maximize performance, minimize power and reduce chip size. But is there more that can be done after the GDSII is taped out? A recent press release from Alchip Technology dated Feb 4, 2021 claims… Read More
Highlights of the TSMC Technology Symposium – Part 3
Recently, TSMC held their 26th annual Technology Symposium, which was conducted virtually for the first time. This article is the last of three that attempts to summarize the highlights of the presentations. This article focuses on the technology design enablement roadmap, as described by Cliff Hou, SVP, R&D.
Key Takeaways… Read More
Highlights of the TSMC Technology Symposium – Part 2
Recently, TSMC held their 26th annual Technology Symposium, which was conducted virtually for the first time. This article is the second of three that attempts to summarize the highlights of the presentations. This article focuses on the TSMC advanced packaging technology roadmap, as described by Doug Yu, VP, R&D.
Key… Read More
Thermo-compression bonding for Large Stacked HBM Die
Summary
Thermo-compression bonding is used in heterogeneous 3D packaging technology – this attach method was applied to the assembly of large (12-stack and 16-stack) high bandwidth memory (HBM) die, with significant bandwidth and power improvements over traditional microbump attach.
Introduction
The rapid growth of heterogeneous… Read More