Author's Latest Posts


The Learning Imperative


By Tom Morrow An often under-appreciated component of Moore’s Law has been the massive learning and education effort required to sustain continuous improvement at the incredible rate predicted by Gordon Moore nearly 50 years ago. The industry regularly calculates the contribution of lithography-based scaling, wafer size increases, and yield improvements necessary to keep pace with aggressive... » read more

New Materials And Collaboration


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

Industry Leaders See a Promising but Challenging Future


By Tom Morrow “The challenge with all these technologies is that we cannot decouple them from the economics,” said Rick Wallace, president and CEO of KLA-Tencor during the annual Executive Summit at SEMICON West. While aligning the economics of new production technologies such as EUV, III-V materials, FinFETS, and 450 mm wafers have yet to be fully worked out, the insatiable appetite for... » read more

IC Packaging Innovation Increasingly Replacing Moore’s Law in Mobile Electronics Competition


By Tom Morrow Smart phones, tablets, e-readers and other mobile applications are increasingly replacing PCs as the key drivers of the semiconductor industry. Consequently, IC packaging innovations that deliver high performance applications in a low-profile, low-cost, and low power design are competing with next node processing technologies as the critical platform for competition in the mobi... » read more