Saturday, April 17, 2010

Semiconductor International is No More

Semiconductor International is shutting down. Its web site will close on April 30, 2010. Those who'd like to keep its nice image sensor-related articles have little time to save them in private place. Some recent interesting articles are:

Philip Garrou series on 3D packaging, including the recent article on 3D integration stress management talking about larger-diameter TSVs causing large mobility changes in silicon because of large deformation and shear stress. (Source: Synopsys):


Alother Philip's article talks about the recent trends in TSV technology and packaging. Generally, The 3D panel on IMAPS 2007 conference was in complete agreement that the 3D IC market has evolved into two main segments:

  • (1) vias middle either Cu or W and
  • (2) vias last from backside Cu (see below)
  • Anything else will be niche.

Prismark revealed their 2014 market projection of 3.2M TSV wafers consisting of

Application 3-D      % of Appl
Image Sensors         90
Rf/SiP                     15
MEMS                     20
Logic                      <1
DRAM                       7
Other memory          1

Semiconductor International used to be a place where Chipworks' Dick James published many reverse engineering findings, such as this one: DSLR Image Sensor Innovation – Who Is Challenging Canon and Nikon’s lead?, from September 11, 2009.

It's a pity that this wealth of information is going to disappear by the end of this month.

4 comments:

  1. It's sad...
    I think you know that Chipworks' articles can be found in their blog (just in case http://www.chipworks.com/blogs.aspx)

    ReplyDelete
  2. As far as 3D packaging is concerned : there is a specific workshop focusing on those technologies in PAVIA (Italia) at the end of the week. http://eil.unipv.it/MaKaC/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=0

    NJ (Fr)

    ReplyDelete
  3. If anyone wants to download the any truly useful articles in pdf form and mail them to me, I will post them on the imagesensors.org website on-line library for public benefit. If any official complains about copyright issues, then of course the offending article will have to be removed.

    Mail me at my imagesensors.org email address. The one that goes fossum@

    ReplyDelete
  4. Vladimir - just to let you know that I saved all my Sold State Technology 3D-TSV blogs to my web page here [ http://www.microelectronic-consultants-of-nc.com/]. They are under "Perspectives from the leading edge and are indexed.

    ReplyDelete

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