Manufacturing Bits: April 24


Super electron guns The Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is developing a new type of electron gun based on superconducting technology. The new superconducting electron gun recently produced its first beam of electrons, according to SLAC. The technology is being developed for future high-energy X-ray lasers and ultra-fast electron microscopes. Electron guns a... » read more

Auto Industry Driving Faster


Automotive electronics used to be a lumbering, trailing-edge business. Not anymore. Today, powerful semiconductor technologies are driving the development of automotive features that once might have been seen as science fiction, such as advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) which are paving the way to self-driving cars. Overall, the market for semiconductors in automotive applications is... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Trade The trade tensions are building between the U.S. and China. In the latest move, the U.S. Department of Commerce has imposed a ban on U.S. companies selling chips to ZTE, a Chinese telecom equipment and mobile phone vendor. The ban has been implemented on ZTE for seven years after the firm “was caught illegally shipping U.S. goods to Iran,” according to a report from Reuters. This ... » read more

Mashup At 7nm


The merger of two standards organizations typically falls well below the radar of most engineers, but folding the ESD Alliance (formerly known as the EDA Consortium) into SEMI is a different kind of deal. Ever since the introduction of finFETs and multiple patterning, EDA tools have become an integral part of the development of new manufacturing processes. Without those tools, there is no po... » read more

Too Many, Too Few Rare Earths


A team from Japan recently made a major discovery—they found massive deposits of rare earths on the ocean floor off the coast of Japan. The team of Waseda University, the University of Tokyo and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) found a deposit that equates to 16 million tons of rare earths. Rare earths are a group of critical materials used in various ele... » read more

Criticality of Wafer Edge Inspection and Metrology Data to All-Surface Defectivity Root Cause and Yield Analysis


Abstract As device sizes continue to increase on devices at 2x nm design rule and beyond and high wafer stress is worsening due to multi-film stacking in the vertical memory process, we observe an increasing trend in edge yield issues worldwide. Wafer edge inspection and metrology become thus critical to drive root cause analysis for improving the yield during a new technology ramp. Nowadays, ... » read more

Design Rule Complexity Rising


Variation, edge placement error, and a variety of other issues at new process geometries are forcing chipmakers and EDA vendors to confront a growing volume of increasingly complex, and sometimes interconnected design rules to ensure chips are manufacturable. The number of rules has increased to the point where it's impossible to manually keep track of all of them, and that has led to new pr... » read more

Toward A 5G, AI-Centric World


The market environment over the coming years will continue to experience an explosion of data generation from a variety of new sources such as smart cars, smart factories, smart hospitals and smart network infrastructure. Data explosion combined with artificial intelligence (AI) will create a renaissance of computing and storage hardware. Mobile World Congress 2018 (MWC) reinforced this market ... » read more

New Patterning Options Emerging


Several fab tool vendors are rolling out the next wave of self-aligned patterning technologies amid the shift toward new devices at 10/7nm and beyond. Applied Materials, Lam Research and TEL are developing self-aligned technologies based on a variety of new approaches. The latest approach involves self-aligned patterning techniques with multi-color material schemes, which are designed for us... » read more

Masks, Models And Alternative Lithography


Every February an outstanding group of eBeam luminaries gathers at events hosted by the eBeam Initiative during the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference. It was our 10th annual lunch with standing room only attendance again this year. It’s an honor to get to know some of these very talented people. We started producing videos for the community over five years ago to share more of their storie... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →