Coronavirus

COVID-19 has had an impact on the entire healthcare market. During the peak of the first wave, companies from the industrial and automotive sectors worked on repurposing their sensors and production lines to provide pressure sensors for respirators and temperature sensors for thermometers. At the...

SEMI is pleased to welcome Singapore-based UTAC Holdings Ltd., formed nearly 50 years ago, as a new member. UTAC is a leading independent provider of assembly and test services for a broad range of semiconductor chips, offering a full range of semiconductor assembly and test services across analog,...

Europe is facing an acute shortage of skilled microelectronics workers that undermines the growth potential of not only the electronics industry but the European economy as a whole. Nearly 1.1 million job advertisements for electro-engineering workers were placed in the EU between mid-2018 and the...

A 500,000 ft2 (~47,000 m2) state-of-the-art cleanroom facility still towers as the largest U.S. high-technology investment in Vietnam 10 years after starting operations in Saigon High Tech Park in District 9, Ho Chi Minh City. The structure built by Intel Products Vietnam (IPV) on the back of a $1...

Semiconductor equipment spending is mounting a strong recovery on the strength of explosive chip demand for work-at-home and study-at-home electronics fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the growth, the 2017-2018 memory boon that triggered a critical subsystems shortage is still fresh on the...

MEMS sensors have come a long way over the past few decades. The late 1990’s brought us the mass production of both MEMS accelerometers for automotive air bag crash sensors and MEMS gyros for rollover detection and anti-locking braking systems (ABS). In the early 2000’s, MEMS sensors made the jump...

Like so much else these days, career mentoring in the semiconductor industry has gone virtual. And, among hiring managers, for good reason: Chip companies are facing a new urgency to hire skilled workers as recent SEMI forecasts spanning packaging materials and fab equipment spending show strong...

The costs of production are typically based on labor and materials and define manufacturing expenses. But is this approach accurate enough? What about the cost of poor quality and lack of efficiency in production? How is the pandemic impacting semiconductor manufacturing and what can we expect from...

Earlier this year when the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began sprinting around the world, public health officials told us that social distancing was the most effective way to slow its spread. We’re now many months into the pandemic, and social distancing, combined with mask-wearing, is still the...

While the world awaits a working vaccine to protect us from COVID-19, we need to employ all available tools to help curb the spread of this novel virus. On the one hand, it’s remarkable that we’re relying on the same low-tech tools that our forebears used to moderate the pandemic of 1918 — social...