Deeper Inside Intel

[Shintai]

Semiconductor Engineering .:. Deeper Inside Intel

Quite some gold nuggets in it and worth a read.

Mark Bohr, senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration at Intel, and Zane Ball, vice president in the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel and co-general manager of Intel Custom Foundry, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss the future directions of transistors, process technology, the foundry business and packaging. What follows are excerpts of those conversations.

 

[pxc]

That was a very interesting interview. EUV power output still seems to be a problem, so it's not going to be ready as 7nm development continues. FinFET might be around for a few more nodes. The interviewer didn't push new materials very much, but Intel is still calling several likely candidates "immature". That is confusing, and hopefully just misdirection.

 

[Shintai]

Interesting, LG joined Intels custom foundry and will ship 10nm chips next year from it.

Now Apple seems to join the fun:
Intel aims to challenge TSMC over Apple chip orders by 2018- Nikkei Asian Review

Intel also got iPhone modem orders earlier.

 

[Shintai]

Intel Custom Foundry EMIB

A bit more on the EMIB.

Embedded Multi-die Interconnect Bridge (EMIB) is an elegant and cost-effective approach to in-package high density interconnect of heterogeneous chips. The industry refers to this application as 2.5D package integration. Instead of using a large silicon interposer typically found in other 2.5D approaches, EMIB uses a very small bridge die, with multiple routing layers. This bridge die is embedded as part of our substrate fabrication process

Bye, bye interposers.