Seeing Spots At 10nm


By Ed Sperling The relentless march to smaller process nodes means the defects are getting smaller, more numerous, and much harder to find. That explains why Applied Materials and KLA-Tencor both introduced new defect review and classification tools last week. The move to the 1x nm is on the top of both companies’ agendas, and with that comes defects on the walls of finFETs in addition to... » read more

Experts At The Table: Changes In The Ecosystem


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Michael Buehler-Garcia, director of design solutions marketing at Mentor Graphics; Seow Yin Lim, group director for marketing at Cadence; Kevin Kranen, director of strategic alliances at Synopsys, and Tom Quan, director at TSMC. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: How are chipmakers working with the rest... » read more

New Reliability Issues Emerge


By Ed Sperling Most consumers define reliability by whether a device turns on and works as planned, but the term is becoming harder to define as complexity increases and systems are interconnected. Adding more functionality in less space has made it more difficult to build complex chips, and it has made it more difficult to prevent problems in those chips. Verification coverage is a persist... » read more

Marching Orders


Reports back from the front lines of Moore’s Law are rather consistent—14nm and 16nm finFETs are do-able, but they’re not easy to design, verify or manufacture. In fact, the only high-volume source of production-proven finFETs at this point is Intel, which is turning them out at 22nm. A number of issues are cropping up at the most advanced nodes, and while each is ultimately solvable, ... » read more

The Week In Review: June 7


By Ed Sperling For all the hesitation about moving the Design Automation Conference to Austin, it turns out that Austin has a lot of hardware engineers. In fact they flooded into the conference, turning it into one of the most successful in recent years and setting new records in multiple areas. Even Texas Gov. Rick Perry showed up to see what all the fuss was about. Mentor Graphics added c... » read more

Tech Talk: FinFETs, FD-SOI And The Future Of SoC Design


Mary Ann White, marketing manager for Synopsys' Galaxy Implementation Platform, talks with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering about new opportunities to reduce power and improve performance, and where the pain points will be. [youtube vid=kuJdcHIRxfU] » read more

FinFET Technology


This white paper discusses the major challenges with FinFETs and how TSMC has been collaborating with Synopsys, one of their ecosystem partners, to deliver a complete solution. Key elements of this solution include comprehensive FinFET profiling without impact to design tool runtime and proven, verified IP availability. The TSMC 16-nm FinFET solution will ensure mutual customers swiftly move to... » read more

Bigger Wafers, Bigger Risk


At 22/20/16/14nm the semiconductor industry is experiencing a rather new twist on Moore’s Law. Smaller, as in smaller feature sizes, is no longer assumed to be cheaper—or at least not for everyone. In fact, the cost per transistor for the first time in more than half a century could rise in some cases. Whether this outlook improves as the semiconductor industry gains more experience wit... » read more

Hot Stuff


By Ann Steffora Mutschler When it comes to thermal modeling, which has been practiced for many years, the challenges are daunting. The good news is that approaches are emerging as challenges increased with smaller process nodes and design complexity. Viewed from a number of viewpoints—transistor, chip, package, board and system—thermal models traditionally have been created from m... » read more

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