Powering CFETs From The Backside


The first CMOS circuits to incorporate backside power connections are likely to be based on stacked nanosheet transistors, but further down the road, planners envision complementary transistors (CFETs) that vertically integrate stacked NFET and PFET devices. With at least twice the thickness of a nanosheet transistor, connecting CFETs to each other and to the rest of the circuit is likely to... » read more

What’s Different About Next-Gen Transistors


After nearly a decade and five major nodes, along with a slew of half-nodes, the semiconductor manufacturing industry will begin transitioning from finFETs to gate-all-around stacked nanosheet transistor architectures at the 3nm technology node. Relative to finFETs, nanosheet transistors deliver more drive current by increasing channel widths in the same circuit footprint. The gate-all-aroun... » read more

Transistors Reach Tipping Point At 3nm


The semiconductor industry is making its first major change in a new transistor type in more than a decade, moving toward a next-generation structure called gate-all-around (GAA) FETs. Although GAA transistors have yet to ship, many industry experts are wondering how long this technology will deliver — and what new architecture will take over from there. Barring major delays, today’s GAA... » read more

The Future Of Transistors And IC Architectures


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. What follows are excerpt... » read more

Making Chips At 3nm And Beyond


Select foundries are beginning to ramp up their new 5nm processes with 3nm in R&D. The big question is what comes after that. Work is well underway for the 2nm node and beyond, but there are numerous challenges as well as some uncertainty on the horizon. There already are signs that the foundries have pushed out their 3nm production schedules by a few months due to various technical issu... » read more

FD-SOI Strains For The Future


One of the challenges facing supporters of FD-SOI is the need to provide a pathway to improved performance. While FD-SOI wafers offer some significant advantages over bulk silicon wafers, performance enhancements like strain and alternative channel materials are more difficult to implement in the thin SOI environment. On the other hand, once a fab is willing to incorporate layer transfer techni... » read more

New Challenges For Post-Silicon Channel Materials


In order to bring alternative channel materials into the CMOS mainstream, manufacturers need not just individual transistor devices, but fully manufacturable process flows. Work presented at the recent IEEE Electron Device Meeting (Washington, D.C., Dec. 9-11, 2013) showed that substantial work remains to be done on almost all aspects of such a flow. First and most fundamentally, it is diffi... » read more

What’s After Silicon?


As discussed in the first article in this series, germanium is one of the leading candidates to succeed silicon as the channel material for advanced transistors, and has been for several years. The fundamental challenges of germanium integration were detailed at length in 2007. Unfortunately, knowing what the issues are does not necessarily lead to a solution. When a MOSFET transistor turns ... » read more

Alternative Channel Materials For Post-Silicon FinFETs


At first glance, other semiconductors always have looked more attractive to device designers than silicon. Both germanium and III-V compound semiconductors have higher carrier mobility, allowing faster switching at the same device size. And yet, as manufacturers begin to consider alternative channel materials for sub-10nm devices, the industry is remembering why silicon became a standard in ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 1


Nanoimprint Foundry Singapore’s A*STAR’s Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE) and its partners have launched a new R&D foundry using nanoimprint lithography. The so-called Nanoimprint Foundry is a collaboration between several entities, such as IMRE, Toshiba Machines, EV Group, NTT, NIL Technology, Kyodo International, Micro Resist Technology, Nanoveu and Solves In... » read more

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