200mm Equipment Shortfall


A surge in demand for consumer electronics, communications ICs, sensors and other products has created a shortage in 200mm fab capacity that shows no signs of abating. None of these chips need to be manufactured using the most advanced processes, and there have been enough tweaks to processes at established nodes to eke even more out of existing processes. But that has left chipmakers strugg... » read more

To 7nm And Beyond


Gary Patton, chief technology officer at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], and Thomas Caulfield, senior vice president and general manager of Fab 8, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss future directions in technology, including the next rev of FD-SOI, the future of Moore’s Law, and how some very public challenges will likely unfold. SE: What do you see as the... » read more

Foundry Capacity Investment Led By Taiwan And China


The era of every company building a captive fab for next-generation products is ancient history, as foundries throughout the world provide leading-edge technology and flexible capacity in a timely and cost-effective manner. In today’s mobile-driven ecosystem, faster product development cycles and time-to-market have become the norm for the industry. Now, this trend is even spreading to the co... » read more

Building Faster Chips


By Ed Sperling and Jeff Dorsch An explosion in IoT sensor data, the onset of deep learning and AI, and the commercial rollout of augmented and virtual reality are driving a renewed interest in performance as the key metric for semiconductor design. Throughout the past decade in which mobility/smartphone dominated chip design, power replaced performance as the top driver. Processors ha... » read more

Stacking Logic On Logic


Advanced packaging can be an alphabet soup of possible approaches, from heterogenous integration of multiple die types into a single package, to three-dimensional stacking of multiple dies on top of each other. Three-dimensional chip stacking is most commonly seen in memory devices. Applied to logic, though, there are at least two different ways for integration to proceed. Completely process... » read more

RF Front End Testing With NI PXI


What composes an RF front end in today’s radio devices? If you were to take apart your mobile phone, you would see an assortment of chips with different functions that make wireless communication possible. This white paper focuses on the duplexer, power amplifiers (PAs), and RF transceiver. To read more, click here. » read more

Virtual Fabrication For MEMS Process Development


MEMS fabrication and design are closely coupled, such that design changes could significantly alter the process flow and vice versa. For instance, setting device parameters such as drive capacitance, deflection distance, or proof mass size directly affects the choice of film thickness, etch rate, sidewall profile and so forth. Typically, this requires multiple iterations of the MEMS design/proc... » read more

Introduction To Multi-Patterning


Multi-patterning enables accurate lithographic resolution at today's most advanced nodes. Learn about the basics of this technology, and how it impacts your IC design and verification tasks and responsibilities. To read more, click here. » read more

Manufacturing Bits: July 19


Detecting anapoles A*STAR has detected invisible particles. Researchers from the Singaporean R&D organization have observed a new optical effect in nanoscale disks of silicon, which are patterns of radiation that do not scatter light. One example of a non-radiating source is called an anapole. An anapole, according to A*Star, is a distribution of charges and currents. They do not radiate wi... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab and test equipment The wafer inspection market is heating up. For example, Applied Materials announced its new e-beam inspection system for use in foundry, logic, DRAM and 3D NAND applications. In addition, KLA-Tencor introduced six wafer defect inspection and review systems for leading-edge IC device manufacturing. National Instruments has rolled out a second-generation vector sig... » read more

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