2012 Year-End Consensus Forecast


By Lara Chamness While the first half of the year started out with strong booking and billing activity, continued economic uncertainty has led many device manufacturers to cut back on their equipment investments during the second half of this year. The recently published SEMI Year-End Consensus Forecast predicts that the new equipment market will contract 12.2 percent for this year (to $38.2 b... » read more

Printed electronics – an IDTech update


It’s the season for IDTech’s conferences, so time for another look at the Printed Electronics (PE) opportunity. At the Europe conference this year, the IDTech’s team drew a distinction between past successes with simple screen printed products such as membrane keyboards and the current thrust for higher functionality. Companies such as HP Labs, PARC, and PolyIC, are building active transi... » read more

Interconnect Performance In The Spotlight


By Richard Lewington Are you going to be in the San Francisco area on December 11th? We're hosting a forum to explore the path that interconnect technology must take to keep pace with transistor scaling and the transition to new 3D architectures. Transistors get all the attention these days as the savior of Moore's Law. But there's no point making transistors faster if the wires between ... » read more

Don’t miss Fully-Depleted Tech Symposium during IEDM (SF)


Posted by Adele Hars, Editor-in-Chief, Advanced Substrate News ~  ~ If you want to cut through the noise surrounding the choices for 28nm and beyond, an excellent place to start is the SOI Consortium’s Fully Depleted Technology Symposium. As a member of the design and manufacturing communities, this is your chance to see and hear what industry leaders are actually doing. Planar? F... » read more

MEMS Innovation: A Tipping Point


By Joanne Itow Two years ago I attended my first MEMS Executive Congress and was impressed with the high level of enthusiasm in new applications and growth prospects for MEMS. This year’s event was just as impressive and the new MEMS products continue to amaze me. The market has been flooded with new gadgets, new suppliers and now, new challenges. All MEMS are not created equal. One of th... » read more

Why Do My DP Colors Keep Changing?


By David Abercrombie At 20nm, foundries are using several different double patterning design flows. One of the more common flows does not actually require the design team to decompose their layers into two colors. The designer only has to verify that the design can be decomposed before taping out each single layer. There are certain obvious advantages to this flow. For example, the designer do... » 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

The Search For New Materials


It makes sense that the first chips were built out of silicon. It’s hard to think of a more abundant material than sand, or one that’s so easily accessible in so many places. It’s like building the first homes out of earthen bricks. There was never a shortage of materials. Even aluminum and copper for the wires and interconnects in these chips are readily available, despite the rising ... » read more

Challenges Of Physical Design Closure


By Jean-Marie Brunet A clear trend in IC design is that with each smaller process node, reaching design closure gets more difficult, expensive, and time consuming. Printing ever-smaller features with 193nm wavelength light has introduced unprecedented levels of manufacturing challenges, which are addressed with a growing set of complex design rules (DRC) and design for manufacturing (DFM) cons... » read more

Uneven Growth Ahead


By Joanne Itow SEMI recently released its silicon shipment forecast for 2012-2014. Total wafer shipments are expected to reach record levels in 2013 and 2014. Semico’s Wafer Demand model concurs with that forecast. Wafer demand is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 11.7% over the next five years. The wafer demand pie keeps getting bigger but all the pieces are not growing at th... » read more

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