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war between China and United States. The latter has put Huawei on its entity list or ban list. The hardware in 5G consists of satellites, servers, optical fiber lines, base stations, cell phones, and terminal sensors, and the software consists of various mobile internets, such as Android of Google. Huawei is especially good at making base stations.

      Data and signals can be transmitted via satellites in sky, but satellites can be shot down easily in the beginning of a war. It can be transmitted via optical fibers underground and across oceans. The making of optical fiber requires the doping of rare‐earth elements, so the strategic importance of rare‐earth elements can be appreciated. Also it can be transmitted via base stations on land surface, so the construction of a large number of base stations is of national security concern. It is worth mentioning that Taiwan has successfully used its network of base stations to detect and control the motion and contact of people with Covid virus.

      In the late nineties, dot‐com was developed but soon burst because cell phones were not available. After cell phone becomes popular, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. are now the biggest companies in the world, no more GE, IBM, and Exxon, because of the wide applications of mobile technology.

      About the global standard of requirements in 5G technology, see Table 1.1, the first is point‐to‐point latency of signals, which is only a few milli second. Latency means the total time spent to send out a signal and to receive it back. In a chain of moving cars, if the first car stops suddenly, the second car must stop within the time of latency, otherwise an accident would occur. If we consider a human‐less vehicle, the LiDAR (not radar) on top of the car should be able to detect a sudden appearance of a pedestrian or a car, so that it can stop to avoid an accident.

      No doubt, 5G technology will enhance AI applications. At the end of this book, in Chapter 14, we shall discuss the need of using AI to accelerate the study of reliability, so that we may change it from a time‐dependent event to a time‐independent event. Another area for the use of AI will be the biomedical and health applications. For example, Chinese medicine has been based on big data for many years, and the technique of acupuncture could be improved with modern microelectronic devices. The link between microelectronics and biomedical applications will be the most important advanced technology in the future.

      As the trend of miniaturization in Si technology slows down, microelectronics industry has been looking for ways to keep the downsizing momentum going, meaning to go to more‐than‐Moore! [1–3] The critical feature size in Si devices has already reached nanoscale, below 10 nm. Hence, it is harder and harder to make transistor circuits on a Si chip smaller and smaller without a large cost increase. At present, the most promising way to extend Moore’s law is to go from 2D IC to 3D IC. Actually, the paradigm change has occurred more than 10 years ago, but 3D IC is not in mass production, because of cost and reliability.

      In semiconductor manufacturing, because the product quantity is extremely large, so high yield and high reliability are critically important. Low yield will increase cost, and poor reliability will lead to recall; one example is the battery failure of cell phones. For any consumer electronic product in mass production, the concern of reliability is critical, especially the electronic packaging in 3D IC for advanced consumer electronic products, which are widely used now for distance teaching and home office.

Schematic illustration of scanning electron microscopy (SEM) image of the cross-section of a 3D IC test device. It has only two pieces of Si chips stacking on a polymer board.

      In the above example, besides the active Si chip, the rest, which includes the interposer, can be regarded as electronic packaging. The packaging enables the Si chip to function, as well as to allow us, to interact with the outside world. In the packaging, it is worth mentioning that between two sets of solder joints of different sizes, there should be a redistribution layer (RDL) structure for circuit fan‐out. It increases the number

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