As device scaling powered by Moore’s law faces challenges in meeting industry requirements, advanced packaging and interconnect technologies have emerged as a key alternative for achieving performance, power, form-factor, and cost requirements that are critical to industry drivers such as mobile, 5G, data centres, automotive, and IoT. IME offers a broad range of advanced packaging technology and manufacturing solutions to address current and future industry requirements. Our advanced packaging platforms include 2.5D through-silicon interposer, 3D TSV, fan-out wafer level packaging, MEMS wafer level chip-scale packaging, fine-pitch Cu pillar, Chip-to-Wafer/Wafer-to-Wafer hybrid bonding, electronic-photonic integration, intelligent power module, and thermal solutions. IME works closes with the entire semiconductor supply chain including fabless, foundry, OSAT, Equipment, Materials and EDA partners to ensure our technology solutions are manufacturing ready.
IME’s integrated circuits and AI hardware development team is supported by a strong team of established researchers. The team has amassed an extensive portfolio of IP building blocks, including computing hardware, ultra-low-power sensor node processor (SNP), power management integrated circuit (PMIC), sensor readout IC, radio transceivers, hardware securities and system-on-chip design. These capabilities are designed to support next-generation innovative devices and systems, such as miniaturization, integrated power management, energy efficiency and wireless connectivity for AI-enabled Internet-of-Things (IoT). These capabilities serve the development of hardware AI applications such as autonomous vehicles, machine health monitoring, environment sensing, surveillance, vital signs monitoring, and data computing. Neuromorphic computing and Deep learning are the two latest development that team is focusing on. These AI technology platform represent the two main memory-centric computing architectures: (1) neuro-based SNN analog approach and (2) the deep learning-based digital approach which uses CNN or RNN
The Sensors, Actuators, & Microsystems team focuses on developing novel transducers at the heart of many electronic systems today, bridging the electronic and the real world. Semiconductor microfabrication techniques are leveraged for engineering high performance, microscale devices that can be batch fabricated at low-cost. Some of the key themes in the group are: acoustic sensors, piezoelectrics, as well as gas and chemical sensors.
Advanced Optics Program (AOP), with deep roots in Si photonics, focuses at developing technology platforms for the production of metasurface based flat optic components and systems using existing infrastructure at advanced CMOS foundries. Most of the metasurface-based flat optic components demonstrated worldwide are patterned using EBL, which is known to be great for high resolution patterning but not suitable for mass-manufacturing due to extremely low throughput. AOP team at IME is using Nikon 193 nm immersion scanner to pattern metasurface. Within a short period, team has established full capability of design, fabrication and characterization of various flat optic components – metalens, color filters, band-pass filters, waveplates, dot projectors – on 12” Si/glass wafers.
IME dedicates abundant research energy to drive both digital and analog RRAM technologies toward their greatest potential of reshaping future memory and computing landscapes. The main research focus are digital RRAM as storage class memory (SCM) to close access time gap between working memory and SSD storage, and analog memories for in-memory computing and neuromorphic computing.
As the radio frequency (RF) spectrum gets increasingly crowded in the 5G era, bandpass filters are becoming the most important elements in RF front-end modules of smartphones. IME has been developing innovative Aluminum nitride (AlN) and scandium aluminum nitride (ScAlN) based MEMS technologies and platforms to enable ultra low-loss and wideband acoustic filters for 5G.
The goal of Medtech Programme is to collaborate closely with clinicians, cross-disciplinary research institutes and medical industry partners to address and develop technical solution for unmet clinical needs. IME Medtech Programme design, fabricate, bio-package and characterize highly sensitive Micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) sensors that can measure various physiological parameters in the human body. Such sensors when combined with Application-Specific-Integrated-Circuits (ASIC) and wireless interface circuits result in highly integrated devices for the medical / healthcare industries.
Power electronics involves the control and conversion of electricity using solid-state electronic devices. It is estimated that at least 50% of electricity around the world is controlled by power devices, which are ubiquitously applied throughout all aspects of our lives. While power electronics is currently dominated by silicon-based devices, next-generation power electronics will be based on silicon carbide (SiC), enabling higher energy efficiencies and smaller form factors. The replacement of silicon-based devices with SiC power devices can yield annual energy savings estimated to be in the range of tens of billions of kilowatt hours worldwide. SiC power electronics is instrumental in applications like electric vehicles (traction inverters and on-board chargers), data centers (power supplies) and renewable energy (inverters for solar energy or wind energy).