Digital Twins Target IC Tool And Fab Efficiency


Digital twins have emerged as the hot "new" semiconductor manufacturing technology, enabling fabs to create a virtual representation of a physical system on which to experiment and optimize what's going on inside the real fab. While digital twin technology has been in use for some time in other industries, its use has been limited in semiconductor manufacturing. What's changing is the breadt... » read more

Silicon Photonics Manufacturing Ramps Up


Circuit scaling is starting to hit a wall as the laws of physics clash with exponential increases in the volume of data, forcing chipmakers to take a much closer look at silicon photonics as a way of moving data from where it is collected to where it is processed and stored. The laws of physics are immutable. Put simply, there are limits to how fast an electron can travel through copper. The... » read more

Powering CFETs From The Backside


The first CMOS circuits to incorporate backside power connections are likely to be based on stacked nanosheet transistors, but further down the road, planners envision complementary transistors (CFETs) that vertically integrate stacked NFET and PFET devices. With at least twice the thickness of a nanosheet transistor, connecting CFETs to each other and to the rest of the circuit is likely to... » read more

Package Integrated Vapor Chamber Heat Spreaders


With continuous increases in computational demand in nearly all electronics market segments, even historically lower power packaging is being driven into challenging thermal management situations. Node shrink alone is reaching a limit in maintaining track with Moore’s law. The economics and yield challenges of large monolithic system on chip (SoC) designs are driving the development of silico... » read more

The High NA EUV Imperative: How Computational Lithography Solutions Enable Us To Think Smaller


The future of computing depends on miniaturization, and extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) is one key enabler. Until recently, we have relied on low numerical aperture (NA) EUV systems with an aperture of 0.33 to help us reduce the size of integrated circuits (ICs). As with deep ultraviolet (DUV) technology, this has begun to reach its limits. High NA EUV lithography with a 0.55 aperture rep... » read more

ESD Alliance And SEMI Efforts To Combat Design Automation Software Piracy


Piracy is a growing concern for all software providers, especially those of us with complex and specialized software, such as chip design automation software that is expensive to develop and maintain. That’s why the Electronic System Design Alliance (ESD Alliance), a SEMI Technology Community, spearheaded an industry joint development effort to develop a server certification protocol that ... » read more

Backside Power Delivery Gears Up For 2nm Devices


The top three foundries plan to implement backside power delivery as soon as the 2nm node, setting the stage for faster and more efficient switching in chips, reduced routing congestion, and lower noise across multiple metal layers. The benefits of using this approach are significant. By delivering power using slightly fatter, less resistive lines on the backside, rather than inefficient fro... » read more

Intel, And Others, Inside


Intel this week made a strong case for how it will regain global process technology leadership, unfurling an aggressive technology and business roadmap that includes everything from several more process node shrinks that ultimately could scale into the single-digit angstrom range to a broad shift in how it approaches the market. Both will be essential for processing the huge amount of data for ... » read more

UCIe Goes Back To The Drawing Board


The integration of multiple dies within a single package increasingly is viewed as the next evolution for extending Moore’s Law, but it also presents myriad challenges — particularly in achieving a universally accepted standard integrating plug-and-play chiplets from different vendors. “In some respects, people are already doing this,” says Debendra Das Sharma, Intel senior fellow an... » read more

Building CFETs With Monolithic And Sequential 3D


Successive versions of vertical transistors are emerging as the likely successor to finFETs, combining lower leakage with significant area reduction. A stacked nanosheet transistor, introduced at N3, uses multiple channel layers to maintain the overall channel length and necessary drive current while continuing to reduce the standard cell footprint. The follow-on technology, the CFET, pushes... » read more

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