November 2012 - Page 3 of 5 - Semiconductor Engineering

Mobile Memory Madness
By Ed Sperling - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The insatiable thirst for more bandwidth in smartphones, tablets and other devices has prompted an industry standards body to revamp its mobile memory interface roadmap. As part of the changes, the Joint Electron Devices Engineering Council (JEDEC) has scaled back the initial version of Wide I/O technology and pushed out the introduction date of a true 3D stacked architectur... » read more

MEMS Innovation: A Tipping Point
By Joanne Itow - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Joanne Itow Two years ago I attended my first MEMS Executive Congress and was impressed with the high level of enthusiasm in new applications and growth prospects for MEMS. This year’s event was just as impressive and the new MEMS products continue to amaze me. The market has been flooded with new gadgets, new suppliers and now, new challenges. All MEMS are not created equal. One of th... » read more

Why Do My DP Colors Keep Changing?
By David Abercrombie - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By David Abercrombie At 20nm, foundries are using several different double patterning design flows. One of the more common flows does not actually require the design team to decompose their layers into two colors. The designer only has to verify that the design can be decomposed before taping out each single layer. There are certain obvious advantages to this flow. For example, the designer do... » read more

Experts At The Table: The Sky Isn’t Falling
By Ann Mutschler - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design sat down recently to discuss how the industry is making 3D ICs a reality today with Sylvan Kaiser, chief technology officer at Docea Power; Steve Smith, senior director for 3D-IC strategy at Synopsys; and Ahmed Jerraya, director of strategic design programs at CEA-LETI. SMD: How far are we from having the models we need to ena... » read more

New Materials And Collaboration
By Tom Morrow - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Tom Morrow John Smythe, advanced technology lead for Micron’s Advanced Materials Technology Group, kicked off the 2012 Strategic Materials Conference (SMC) on Oct. 23, with a comprehensive overview of the materials challenges to continued scaling in memory, including a status update on several novel and emerging materials sets that may have potential at sub-20nm. How the industry w... » read more

Reducing IC Cycle Time With Calibre
By Various Writers - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

Technology is both a blessing and a curse. The same shrinking of transistor size that has enabled chip designers to place significantly more functionality on the same die area is also responsible for the significant increases we have seen in the number and complexity of verification rules. It would be nice if we could use this phenomenon to our advantage, as an excuse for why our job of physica... » read more

The Search For New Materials
By Ed Sperling - 15 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

It makes sense that the first chips were built out of silicon. It’s hard to think of a more abundant material than sand, or one that’s so easily accessible in so many places. It’s like building the first homes out of earthen bricks. There was never a shortage of materials. Even aluminum and copper for the wires and interconnects in these chips are readily available, despite the rising ... » read more

The Return Of RC Delay
By Ed Sperling - 14 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design talks with Mehul Naik of Applied Materials about why RC delay has become a hot topic again, and what will be necessary to solve it. [youtube vid=aQjqcpZWi0A] » read more

Spoiled By Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 08 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Over the past 20 years, lithium ion has emerged as the predominant battery technology. While there are a few variants, it seems that for everything from smartphones to automobiles, the same basic technology is being used. Many other technologies that have come and gone over the years—nickel cadmium, nickel metal hydride come to mind in the recent past, but they ar... » read more

More Art Than Science
By Ed Sperling - 08 Nov, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Not so long ago, high-end digital devices were mostly just digital. Today large SoCs contain a significant amount of analog/mixed-signal content. And given that analog circuits have certain sensitivities different from digital blocks, there is a desire to convert some of those analog signals to digital to achieve power savings and take advantage of digital verificat... » read more

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