John Lee, general manager and vice president of Ansys and a member of the ESD Alliance Governing Council, is on a quest to promote industry collaboration to solve many of the multiphysics challenges. When we talked recently, he reinforced his advocacy of open extensible platforms as a workable model for the industry. Ansys is a member of the Electronic System Design Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community.

Smith: It’s been over a year since we talked about 3D IC and bespoke silicon. Are you still seeing them as major trends? Are they changing, accelerating, slowing down or are they here to stay?

Lee: The forecast for 3D IC continues to accelerate. In fact, we expect to see a 3X increase in the number of 3D IC design starts this year over last. It started initially in areas like high-performance compute with AMD and Intel pioneering it. We now see many other markets outside of AI/ML, CPU, GPU and mobile applications. Even the more traditional manufacturers are doing 3D IC designs.

From a foundry standpoint, TSMC has been talking about CoWoS for 10 years. We see the largest number of 2.5D and 3D IC tape-outs going through TSMC, but now Samsung and Intel are starting programs that will be a big service to the industry. 3D IC is here to stay and brings challenges that need to be solved.
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