February 2013 - Page 3 of 6 - Semiconductor Engineering

The Week In Review: Feb. 25
By Ed Sperling - 25 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Is China set to bail out a U.S. government technology darling? Two Chinese automotive companies, Geely and Dongfeng Motor, are reported to have bid between $200 million and $350 million for a majority stake in Fisker, the maker of plug-in hybrid cars. If that happens Fisker—which has $192 million in U.S. federal government loan guarantees—could be headed to China, according... » read more

SPIE Advanced Lithography 2013 – day 0
By Chris Mack - 25 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

Welcome to San Jose and the beginning of the Advanced Lithography Symposium.  The last year seemed to zip by in hurry, and it was an interesting one.  The lithography year 2012 was dominated by two big stories:  progress in directed self assembly (DSA) and lack of progress in Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography.  I’m anxious to hear the progress reports for each this week.  For EUV, de... » read more

Leakage Optimization
By Arvind Narayanan - 24 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Arvind Narayanan For consumer electronics such as cell phones, tablets, and laptops, long battery life is a key requirement. Battery life is directly related to total power consumption—which is a function of switching activity, capacitance, and voltage—across all operational modes. In full active mode on a cell phone, for example, the dynamic power that comes from signal switching is hi... » read more

Optical interconnect for flexible electronics
By Michael Watts - 23 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Michael P.C. Watts At Photonics West, Dow Corning and IBM disclosed a photo-patternable optical interconnect materials set that can support 25 cm interconnect lengths, can be part of a flexible PCB, and survive the industry standard “Telcordia” environmental stress test. The idea of optical interconnect has been circulating as soon as it was realized that chip to chip communication... » read more

Inflection Points And Changes Ahead
By Ed Sperling - 23 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

It’s hard to justify throwing away a well-oiled machine and replacing it with a new one. It works, it’s predictable and it’s low risk. And nowhere is this more evident than in the semiconductor industry. The doubling of transistors every two years for nearly five decades has created a $300 billion chip industry, reduced the price of processing by orders of magnitude, and made possible ele... » read more

Bit Mapping
By Ed Sperling - 22 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

The rule of thumb for semiconductor manufacturing is that big breakthroughs tend to last a decade, or about five process nodes. While the transistor already has spanned more than five decades and the IC more than four decades, the technology used to create them typically only lasts about one. 193nm lithography has been around more than a decade. Bets were being made publicly back at 45nm—o... » read more

Good Pattern Flow Ahead For 14, 10nm
By Ann Mutschler - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Given complexity, yield, power and other challenges with leading edge manufacturing, semiconductor foundries increasingly have been forced to require more and more restrictive design rules with each new process node. “They keep adding more design rules and more operations to a particular check to eliminate corner cases where in manufacturing they saw some variant... » read more

Getting Ready For High-Mobility FinFETs
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The IC industry entered the finFET era in 2011, when Intel leapfrogged the competition and rolled out the newfangled transistor technology at the 22nm node. Intel hopes to ramp up its second-generation finFET devices at 14nm by year’s end, with plans to debut its 11nm technology by 2015. Hoping to close the gap with Intel, silicon foundries are accelerating their efforts t... » read more

Foundry Arms Race Under Way
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus A year ago, chipmakers were reeling from a severe shortage of 28nm foundry capacity, prompting foundries to ramp up their fabs at a staggering pace. At the time, foundries were unable to keep up with huge and unforeseen demand for mobile chips. The shortfall was also caused by low yields and the overall lack of installed 28nm capacity. Today, the 28nm crunch is largely ov... » read more

Optical Lithography, Take Two
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has missed the initial stages of the 10nm logic and 1xnm NAND flash nodes. Chipmakers hope to insert EUV by the latter stages of 10nm or by 7nm, but vendors are not counting on EUV in the near term and are preparing their back-up plans. Barring a breakthrough with EUV or other technology, IC ... » read more

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