category: Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Manufacturing Bits: March 21
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

Making harder windows Using cubic silicon nitride materials, a team of researchers have developed a harder window that can sustain severe conditions. There is a demand for harder and stronger windows in various applications, such as engines, ball bearings, cutting tools and other others. To enable this technology, researchers used materials based on transparent polycrystalline ceramics. One... » read more

Patterning Problems Pile Up
By Mark LaPedus - 20 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 4

Chipmakers are ramping up 16nm/14nm finFET processes, with 10nm and 7nm now moving into early production. But at 10nm and beyond, chipmakers are running into a new set of problems. While shrinking feature sizes of a device down to 10nm, 7nm, 5nm and perhaps beyond is possible using current and future fab equipment, there doesn't seem to be a simple way to solve the edge placement error (EPE)... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing
By Mark LaPedus - 17 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers At this week’s TSMC Technology Symposium in San Jose, Calif., TSMC rolled out a dizzying array of new processes and technologies. Perhaps the most surprising announcement was a 22nm bulk CMOS process, which is geared for ultra low-power planar chips. The technology will compete against a 22nm FD-SOI technology from GlobalFoundries. Stay tuned. The battle has just begun. As e... » read more

Playing With Chip Volumes
By Ed Sperling - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

The overall market for semiconductors continues to grow, but the number of applications that will generate enormous volumes continues to shrink. In theory, this is good for the overall semiconductor industry, but it raises important questions about where R&D dollars will go in the future. The fundamental problem is that the semiconductor business is a volume business for one or two markets. ... » read more

Following Multiple Patterns
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 2

The lithography market is in flux. Today, chipmakers plan to extend today’s 193nm immersion lithography and multi-patterning to at least 10nm and 7nm. For the most critical layers, though, it’s unclear if optical lithography can extend beyond 7nm. For that reason, chipmakers hope to insert extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at 7nm and/or 5nm. To get a handle on the state of patterning, S... » read more

TFETs And/Or MOSFETs For Low-Power Design
By Katherine Derbyshire - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

As discussed in Reducing Subthreshold Swing With TFETs, papers at December’s IEEE Electron Device Meeting examined a variety of potential designs for tunneling transistors (TFETs). That focus continued at the recent CS International Conference. In particular, Nadine Collaert discussed IMEC’s work on InGaAs homo-junction devices. Many compound semiconductor devices depend on heterojunctio... » read more

TFETs Cut Sub-Threshold Swing
By Katherine Derbyshire - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

One of the main obstacles to continued transistor scaling is power consumption. As gate length decreases, the sub-threshold swing (SS) — the gate voltage required to change the drain current by one order of magnitude — increases. As Qin Zhang, Wei Zhao, and Alan Seabaugh of Notre Dame explained in 2006, SS faces a theoretical minimum of 60 mV/decade at room temperature in conventional MO... » read more

2017 Off To A Good Start, January Up 10.6% Year Over Year
By Jim Feldhan - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

January 2017 semiconductor sales exceeded $29 billion, representing a 10.6% increase over January 2016 and a decline of 10% from December 2016. The average weekly industry ship rate for January was $7.3 billion. Extending this ship rate for the year would produce an annual revenue of $380 billion or 10% growth. Semico is forecasting a couple of slow months and some price degradation on a few ke... » read more

Inside Lithography And Masks
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 2

Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss lithography and photomask technologies with Gregory McIntyre, director of the Advanced Patterning Department at [getentity id="22217" e_name="Imec"]; Harry Levinson, senior fellow and senior director of technology research at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; David Fried, chief technology officer at [getentity id="22210" e_name="Cove... » read more

What’s New On The MEMS Horizon?
By Mike Rosa - 16 Mar, 2017 - Comments: 0

In my previous blog post, I discussed emerging trends and the increased demand for MEMS; now I’ll focus on what we can expect in the immediate future in terms of new device technologies and MEMS-enabled products. While the more well-known MEMS such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones and pressure sensors continue to grow in volume as they find new applications in things like wire... » read more

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