category: Blogs – MD

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Preparing For Change
By Ed Sperling - 16 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 0

Throw out the most optimistic and the most pessimistic predictions about the future of the foundry model and you probably arrive at a reasonable approximation of how things will actually play out. It's clear that the number of customers at the front end of process technology will shrink after 20nm. It simply costs too much to design and manufacture a chip, and there aren’t enough markets c... » read more

Why 450mm wafers?
By Chris Mack - 08 Aug, 2012 - Comments: 1

Why is 450-mm development so important to Intel (and Samsung and TSMC)? A few years ago, Intel and TSMC began heavily promoting the need for a transition from the current standard silicon wafer size, 300 mm, to the new 450-mm wafers.  While many have worked on 450-mm standards and technology for years, it is only recently that the larger wafer has received enough attention and support (not ... » read more

Analog In The 300mm Era
By Adrienne Downey - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Adrienne Downey Semico forecasts the 2012 analog market will grow 5.1% to $44.5 billion, up from $42.3 billion in 2011. This is higher than the 0.1% analog revenue growth experienced in 2011 but lower than the 12.6% growth expected in 2013. Growth is coming from automotive electronics, the energy industry, wireless communications, and healthcare diagnostic and monitoring devices. In a re... » read more

Litho Community Meets And Votes
By Marc David Levenson - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

Every 18 months or so, the leading lithography lights of the IEEE meet in an off-the-record workshop to discuss the state and future of our craft. This year’s event took place amid the restored colonial splendor of Williamsburg Virginia in June. Co-chairs Mordechai Rothschild and Lars Liebmann assembled a technical program that covered not only lithography for semiconductor manufacturing, but... » read more

Flowing Copper
By Applied Materials Writers - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Richard Lewington If you were to slice up a microchip and take a look (you’d need a really powerful microscope, I'm afraid) you would see what looks like a nanoscale layer cake. All the active circuit elements—transistors, memory cells, etc.—are on the bottom. The other 90% of the chip is a maze of tiny copper wires, which we call interconnects. The history of chip developme... » read more

Investment Options
By Ed Sperling - 31 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

It's clear that something fundamental has changed in the semiconductor manufacturing industry. What's less clear is how this will play out over the long term. Intel's agreement to invest more than $4 billion in ASML to ensure the continued development of EUV and 450mm wafer technology is more than just a one-off deal. It's a very public recognition that the astronomical cost of design and ma... » read more

A customizable imaging spectrometer – otherwise known as a “hyperspatial imager”
By Michael Watts - 16 Jul, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Michael P C Watts A camera that can detect any color even IR and UV would be very useful for any number of inspection or detection tasks….. a “hyperspatial imager”. The classic RGB color camera is limited by the RGB color filters which detect a limited range of visible wavelengths, known as the “color gamut” of the camera. At Photonics West 2012 in San Francisco, a team from Ime... » read more

Monsters, Inc.: How Do I Fix These Double Patterning Errors Anyway?
By David Abercrombie - 29 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By David Abercrombie Just mention double patterning (DP) to designers, and you can see the fear in their eyes. There is real trepidation about what kind of monster DP design debugging will be. In this article, I hope to alleviate some of that trepidation by educating you on manual correction techniques, automated fixing hints, and automated fixing capabilities you can adopt to help you with DP... » read more

Leti Looks at Using Strain with FD-SOI for High-Perf Apps
By Various Writers - 29 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

The researchers at Leti working on FD-SOI have extremely deep expertise in it. One of the areas they've looked at is performance boosters. With the interest in FD-SOI rapidly increasing on the heels of the recent ST-GF announcement, their work becomes even more timely. A key Leti team wrote a summary of some recent strain work, which first appeared as part of the Advanced Substra... » read more

Manufacturing & MEMS
By Joanne Itow - 26 Jun, 2012 - Comments: 0

By Joanne Itow There’s been a lot of attention focused on MEMS in the past couple of years, and rightfully so. In 2011 when total semiconductor revenues grew by only 1.3%, MEMS revenues grew by more than 34%. MEMS have been activating air bags in our cars and projecting images on DLP screens for years, but it wasn’t until the accelerometer in smartphones when mainstream semiconductor manuf... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →

  • Sponsors

About

Navigation

Connect With Us

Copyright ©2013-2025 SMG   |  Terms of Service  |  Privacy Policy