EUV: Cost Killer Or Savior?


Moore’s Law, the economic foundation of the semiconductor industry, states that transistor density doubles in each technology generation, at constant cost. As IMEC’s Arindam Mallik explained, however, the transition to a new technology node is not a single event, but a process. Typically, when the new technology is first introduced, it brings a 20% to 25% wafer cost increase. Process opt... » read more

The Deep And Dark Webs


From time to time we hear a snippet or two about the “other” Web – the dark side of the Internet and the Web. For the most part, until something happens that brings the activity within that arena to the surface (such as the recent Silk Road exposure where anything was available for a price), that segment quietly hums along. But that is about to change. Once the IoE evolution gets tract... » read more

Electronics Butterfly Effect


Everyone has heard of the butterfly effect where a small change in a non-linear system can result in large difference in an outcome. For the past 40 years, the electronics industry has approximated a linear system, fed primarily by Moore’s Law. The incremental changes available at each new process node have led us to make incremental changes and improvements in many aspects of the design, its... » read more

Who’s Calling The Shots


As discussed in part one of this report, OEMs are making more of the decisions about what goes into a system design. A large part of this shift involves software, which falls on many plates throughout the ecosystem. Making sure all of the layers of software interoperate and integrate well together is no small feat, and it is growing in complexity at every turn as systems becomes more sophist... » read more

Inside The 5G Smartphone


Amid a slowdown in the cell phone business, the market is heating up for perhaps the next big thing in wireless—5th generation mobile networks or 5G. In fact, major carriers, chipmakers and telecom equipment vendors are all rushing to get a piece of the action in 5G, which is the follow-on to the current wireless standard known as 4G or long-term evolution (LTE). Intel, Samsung and Qualcom... » read more

Recharging The Battery


There are few technologies in today’s cutting-edge technological environment that have a difficult time finding new levels of performance. Battery technology is one of them. With the exception of a few experimental offerings, batteries and their performance metrics are relatively flat. There has been some progress, of course. But when compared to other technologies such as transistors, mem... » read more

Who’s Calling The Shots


Throughout the PC era and well into the mobile phone market, it was semiconductor companies that called the shots while OEMs followed their lead and designed systems around chips. That’s no longer the case. A shift has been underway over the past half decade, and continuing even now, to reverse that trend. The OEM — or systems company as it is more commonly called today — now determine... » read more

Reliability After Planar Silicon


Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) poses a very serious reliability challenge for highly scaled planar silicon transistors, as previously discussed. However, the conventional planar silicon transistor appears to be nearing the end of its life for other reasons, too. The mobility of carriers in silicon limits switching speed even as it becomes more difficult to maintain sufficient elec... » read more

What Will 7nm And 5nm Look Like?


Citing an assortment of undisclosed manufacturing issues, Intel in July pushed out the introduction of its 10nm chip and process technology to the second half of 2017. This is roughly six or more months later than expected. With the delay at 10nm, [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"] also pushed out its process cadence from 2 to 2.5 years. Other foundries, meanwhile, are struggling to keep ... » read more

Cloud 2.0


Corporate data centers are reluctant adopters of new technology. There is too much at stake to make quick changes, which accounts for a number of failed semiconductor startups over the past decade with better ideas for more efficient processors, not to mention rapid consolidation in other areas. But as the amount of data increases, and the cost of processing that data decreases at a slower rate... » read more

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