category: Manufacturing, Packaging and Materials

category: IoT, Security & Automotive

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Mark LaPedus - 17 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers TSMC posted mixed results in the quarter, although the news was generally positive. The foundry giant raised its capital spending plans. “Our second quarter business was sequentially flat, as the continued 5G infrastructure deployment and HPC-related product launches offset weaknesses in other platforms,” said Wendell Huang, vice president and CFO at TSMC. “Moving into third q... » read more

Make Way For Flexible ICs
By Ed Sperling - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

The push to develop intelligent sensors everywhere does not require everything to be on a silicon substrate. In fact, a growing part of the market increasingly is focused on flexible substrates. The market for printed sensors is roughly $3.6 billion today, according to a new report by IDTechEx. In a decade, that number is expected to grow to $4.5 billion, according to the firm, with growth i... » read more

Time To Watch China’s Equipment Efforts
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

For years, China has been developing its own semiconductor equipment and materials industry. The goal has been to reduce its dependence on foreign equipment and material vendors. Some China-based equipment vendors have made their presence felt. But overall, China’s equipment companies have barely made a dent in the market. Hardly anyone has been paying attention to China’s equipment ... » read more

Speeding Up The R&D Metrology Process
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Several chipmakers are making some major changes in the characterization/metrology lab, adding more fab-like processes in this group to help speed up chip development times. The characterization/metrology lab, which is generally under the radar, is a group that works with the R&D organization and the fab. The characterization lab is involved in the early analytical work for next-generati... » read more

Semiconductor Memory Evolution And Current Challenges
By Michael Hargrove - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

The very first all-electronic memory was the Williams-Kilburn tube, developed in 1947 at Manchester University. It used a cathode ray tube to store bits as dots on the screen’s surface. The evolution of computer memory since that time has included numerous magnetic memory systems, such as magnetic drum memory, magnetic core memory, magnetic tape drive, and magnetic bubble memory. Since the 19... » read more

Spiking Neural Networks Place Data In Time
By Katherine Derbyshire - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Artificial neural networks have found a variety of commercial applications, from facial recognition to recommendation engines. Compute-in-memory accelerators seek to improve the computational efficiency of these networks by helping to overcome the von Neumann bottleneck. But the success of artificial neural networks also highlights their inadequacies. They replicate only a small subset of th... » read more

Advanced Materials For High-Temperature Process Integration
By James Lamb - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

From the last several lithography nodes, in the 14 to 10nm range, to the latest nodes, in the 7 to 5nm range, the requirements for patterning and image transfer materials have increased dramatically. One of the key pinch points is the tradeoff between planarization and the high-temperature stability required from carbon films used in patterning and post-patterning process integration. Patter... » read more

Speeding Up Process Optimization With Virtual Processing
By Coventor - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Advanced CMOS scaling and new memory technologies have introduced increasingly complex structures into the device manufacturing process. For example, the increase in NAND memory layers has achieved greater vertical NAND scaling and higher memory density, but has led to challenges in high aspect ratio etch patterning and foot print scaling issues. Unique integration and patterning schemes have b... » read more

Beyond-Line-Of-Sight Troposcatter Communications Primer
By Kasyap Patel - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

Though tropospheric scatter (troposcatter, or tropo) communications technology has existed since the 1950s and was used by the U.S. military from 1960 to 2002, this legacy technology is being revitalized in the wake of concerns around the reliability of tactical satellite communications (Satcom). For several decades, satellites were a reliable and secure method of communications that provided s... » read more

Atomic Layer Etch Expands To New Markets
By Mark LaPedus - 16 Jul, 2020 - Comments: 0

The semiconductor industry is developing the next wave of applications for atomic layer etch (ALE), hoping to get a foothold in some new and emerging markets. ALE, a next-generation etch technology that removes materials at the atomic scale, is one of several tools used to process advanced devices in a fab. ALE moved into production for select applications around 2016, although the technolog... » read more

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