category: Blogs – MD

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

MCU Sales Up in 2017 And 2018
By Joanne Itow - 24 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Microcontroller (MCU) sales are expected to grow over 9% this year while units increase over 16%. IoT and automotive are the major reason for the growth in general MCUs; however, the product group has been transitioning into several distinct segments that are being buried within the data of the broad MCU market. Over the past five years total MCU revenues have essentially remained flat; however... » read more

Exploring New Scaling Approaches
By Mark LaPedus - 19 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

At the recent SPIE Photomask Technology + Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography 2017 conference, Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss semiconductor technology with Tsu-Jae King Liu, the TSMC Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. More specifically, Liu discussed some of the new... » read more

Improving Optical Overlay And Measurement
By Adam Ge - 19 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

By Adam Ge and Shimon Levi Patterning challenges for the semiconductor industry are growing as the number of multi-patterned layers being used in the 10nm and beyond nodes increase. Patterning requires highly accurate overlay which has always been an issue, but with the added complexities of multi-patterning, smaller dimensions and subsequent tightening overlay error budget, it is now a majo... » read more

What’s Up With MEMS?
By Paula Doe - 19 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

New sensor technologies, and smarter ways of integrating more intelligence, continue to generate unexpected opportunities in the changing MEMS business. Changes needed for sensors for context awareness If digital assistants are ever going to be really useful, they’ll need some particular sensor capabilities to understand emotion, suggests Lama Nachman, head of Intel’s Anticipatory Compu... » read more

Controlling Uniformity At The Edge
By Aaron Eppler - 19 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers want every part of the wafer to produce, or yield, good die. Advances in process technologies over the years have just about made this a reality, even as feature dimensions continue to shrink and devices grow ever more complex. Now, the last frontier is improving yields at the edge of the wafer – the outer 10 mm or so – where chemical, physical, and even thermal discontinuitie... » read more

Reducing BEOL Parasitic Capacitance Using Air Gaps
By Michael Hargrove - 19 Oct, 2017 - Comments: 0

Reducing back-end-of-line (BEOL) interconnect parasitic capacitance remains a focus for advanced technology node development. Porous low-k dielectric materials have been used to achieve reduced capacitance, however, these materials remain fragile and prone to reliability concerns. More recently, air gap has been successfully incorporated into 14nm technology [1], and numerous schemes have been ... » read more

5 Takeaways From SEMI’s SMC
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Sep, 2017 - Comments: 0

At the recent Strategic Materials Conference (SMC), there were a multitude of presentations on a number of subjects. The event, sponsored by SEMI, had presentations on the IC industry, market drivers, electronic materials and other subjects. In no particular order, here are my five takeaways from SMC: Materials M&A mania Last year, the IC industry experienced a dizzying array of merger ... » read more

Fab Equipment Spending Sets New Record
By Christian Dieseldorff - 21 Sep, 2017 - Comments: 0

Fab equipment spending (new and refurbished) is expected to increase by 37% for 2017, reaching a new annual spending record of about $55 billion. The World Fab Forecast also forecasts that in 2018, fab equipment spending will increase even more, another 5%, for a record high of about $58 billion. The last record spending was in 2011 with about $40 billion. The spending in 2017 is now expected t... » read more

Using Advanced Statistical Analysis To Improve FinFET Transistor Performance
By Jimmy Gu - 21 Sep, 2017 - Comments: 0

Trial and error wafer fabrication is commonly used to study the effect of process changes in the development of FinFET and other advanced semiconductor technologies. Due to the interaction of upstream unit process parameters (such as deposition conformality, etch anisotropy, selectivity) during actual fabrication, variations based upon process changes can be highly complex. Process simulators t... » read more

Big Push For 3D Sensing With iPhone X
By Adrienne Downey - 21 Sep, 2017 - Comments: 0

3D sensing is a buzzword that has been thrown around quite a bit this year in connection with the rumors surrounding the tenth-anniversary iPhone. Although the iPhone X will be the first large-scale consumer push for 3D sensing, the technology has been around for years, particularly in industrial applications such as machine vision. 3D sensing is already used in the PC – think Intel’s RealS... » read more

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