April 2016 - Page 4 of 10 - Semiconductor Engineering


The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers As reported, Samsung is expanding its efforts in the foundry business, a move that will put the company on a collision course with TSMC and others. Samsung's foundry unit is expanding is logic portfolio and moving into the specialty foundry front. It will also make its advanced packaging technology available, such as 2.5D interposers, to customers. In a blog, Samsung said it plans t... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Rambus released the latest version of its platform for analysis of power and electromagnetic side-channel attacks, featuring upgrades to the workstation software and user interface for enhanced system performance and usability in ASIC and FPGA side-channel vulnerability testing. Deals Istuary Innovation Group licensed Arteris' FlexNoC interconnect IP for enterprise storage contro... » read more

The Big Race


An estimated 74.39 million automobiles are forecast to be sold this year, according to Statista. That's up about 2.8% over 2015, which on the surface doesn't look like fabulous growth. What isn't apparent in the numbers, though, is the amount and type of semiconductor content. Electronic control units, which are primarily driven by MCUs, increasingly are being replaced by SoCs. Automotive co... » read more

7nm Fab Challenges


Leading-edge foundry vendors have made the challenging transition from traditional planar processes into the finFET transistor era. The first [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFETs"] were based on the 22nm node, and now the industry is ramping up 16nm/14nm technologies. Going forward, the question is how far the finFET can be scaled. In fact, 10nm finFETs from Samsung are expected to ramp by ye... » read more

Foundries Expand Their Scope


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus Major foundries are stepping up their offerings across a wide swath of technology nodes, specialty processes and advanced packaging—a recognition that end markets are fragmenting and that the path forward includes a mix of new and established processes. As the smart phone market flattens, there is no single "next big thing" to drive volume at the most ... » read more

Improving Transistor Reliability


One of the more important challenges in reliability testing and simulation is the duty cycle dependence of degradation mechanisms such as negative bias temperature instability ([getkc id="278" kc_name="NBTI"]) and hot carrier injection (HCI). For example, as previously discussed, both the shift due to NBTI and the recovery of baseline behavior are very dependent on device workload. This is ... » read more

Modeling Semiconductor Process Variation


3D semiconductors, 3D NAND Flash, FinFETS and other advanced devices are bringing tremendous opportunities to the semiconductor industry. Unfortunately, these devices are also bringing new design, process and production problems. Process variability has been a major contributor to production delays as feature sizes have decreased and process complexity has increased. Virtual fabrication is a co... » read more

Cadence CDNLive Keynote Address: Thoughts and Implications


I attended the Cadence CDNLive conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center on April 5 and 6 and had a chance to listen to four very thought-provoking presentations given by the speakers. These presentations were combined to follow the keynote address given by Cadence CEO, Lip-Bu Tan and addressed several different aspects of the current semiconductor industry landscape. Speakers Lip-... » read more

The Future Of MEMS Sensor Design And Manufacturing


I recently gave an invited talk at the IEEE Inertial Sensors 2016 symposium that discussed the future of commodity MEMS inertial sensor design and manufacturing. Inertial sensors comprise one of the fastest growing and most successful segments of the MEMS market. There are three industry trends that I believe will have major implications for motion sensor design and manufacturing and, more g... » read more

Insider’s Guide To Fab Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss fab technology with Matt Paggi, vice president of advanced technology development at GlobalFoundries. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What’s driving demand for semiconductors today? Paggi: You are aware of what the worldwide semiconductor revenue growth is this year. There are peaks and valleys in the worldwide semiconduc... » read more

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