April 2013 - Page 4 of 6 - Semiconductor Engineering

Supply Chain Catch-Up
By Ed Sperling - 18 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

There always will be a few big companies marching to the latest process node available to them. The problem these days isn’t their commitment to pushing forward. It’s the baggage train following them. It’s getting longer, more diverse, and in some cases, it’s falling out of sync. The foundries are out in front with 14nm finFETs, and they’re already working on 10nm transistors—pos... » read more

MEMS Explosion
By Rakesh Kumar - 18 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Rakesh Kumar The MEMS market is set to explode. By 2017 the market is expected to be worth $12.2 billion, a 50% increase from 2011, according to IHS iSuppli. Driving this growth will be the continued usage of MEMs devices for consumer applications, such as smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles and cameras. Additionally, new products such as silicon timing devices, tunable capacitors for ant... » read more

Alternatives to silicon for solar cells
By Michael Watts - 18 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 2

Michael P.C. Watts Last time I started to talk about the solar cell business, and whether there was any realistic opportunity for new technologies given the state of the industry. This is the second of a series of blogs to try and answer this question. If you hate serials, the complete analysis is available on my web site www.impattern.com. Let’s start by looking at the potential for other... » read more

GF’S Two Flavors Of FD-SOI
By Various Writers - 17 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

Posted by Adele Hars, Editor-in-Chief, Advanced Substrate News ~  ~ Hearing the news that GlobalFoundries would be offering two flavors of FD-SOI, ASN asked the company to explain the strategy further. Here are the responses provided by Subi Kengeri, Vice President of Advanced Technology Architecture.   [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="110"] Subi Kengeri, VP Advanced T... » read more

Fabs At Risk
By Adrienne Downey - 13 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Adrienne Downey There are hundreds of semiconductor fabs spread all over the world. The trend over the past several years has been one of consolidation into several main manufacturing centers in the Asia/Pacific region, the United States, and Europe. Unfortunately for the industry, many of these fabs are located in areas prone to earthquakes. Some locations are also at an added risk of dama... » read more

Optimizing IP For Power
By Ed Sperling - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling As the amount of commercial IP in an SoC increases, the entire bill of materials is coming under increasing scrutiny because of a new concern—power. Commercial IP, after all, is largely a collection of black-box solutions to speed up the time it takes to bring a chip to market, and frequently to improve the quality, but the cumulative impact on the system power budget has neve... » read more

Dangerous Electricity
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

Electricity to the modern age is as indispensible as air, but too much can be a bad thing for automotive and aerospace applications—especially when it is in the form of electrostatic discharge (ESD). As chips advance to 28nm, 20nm and 16nm, the design window for electrostatic discharge is shrinking for a number of reasons, explained Norman Chang is vice president and senior product strategis... » read more

The Power Game
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Semiconductor engineering teams always have focused on stepping up performance in new designs, but in the mobile, GPU and tablet markets they’re finding that maintaining the balance between higher performance and the same or lower power is increasingly onerous. The reason: Extreme gaming applications can create scenario files that cause dynamic power consumpt... » read more

Executive Briefing: Lip-Bu Tan
By Ed Sperling - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling LPHP: From a high level, what are your customers doing differently these days? Tan: What system companies are looking for is time-to-market and differentiation. They want to differentiate on specific functions. IT has become very important in this process. And in terms of tools, they are looking for end-to-end solutions. Besides the advanced nodes and IP blocks, they are starti... » read more

Dealing With The Data Glut
By Ann Mutschler - 11 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ann Steffora Mutschler Tools like emulation and simulation are an absolute necessity to design and verify today’s complex SoCs, but what happens when you want to do power analysis and the file sizes are too massive for the emulator to handle? Even with an emulator a five-minute mobile phone call could take three months. Understandably, this issue is causing pain to many design teams... » read more

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