Controlling Variability And Cost At 3nm And Beyond


Richard Gottscho, executive vice president and CTO of Lam Research, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about how to utilize more data from sensors in manufacturing equipment, the migration to new process nodes, and advancements in ALE and materials that could have a big impact on controlling costs. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: As more sensors are added int... » read more

Automotive System Design


Burkhard Huhnke, vice president of automotive at Synopsys, looks at how to build and update chips in increasingly sophisticated vehicles, where the problem spots are, and what comes next. » read more

IP Requires System Context At 6/5/3nm


Driven by each successive generation of semiconductor manufacturing technology, complexity has reached dizzying levels. Every part of the design, verification and manufacturing is more complicated and intense the more transistors are able to be packed onto a die. For these reasons, the entire system must be taken into consideration as a whole – not just as individual building blocks as could ... » read more

Controlling IC Manufacturing Processes For Yield


Equipment and tools vendors are starting to focus on data as a means of improving yield, adding more sensors and analysis capabilities into the manufacturing flow to circumvent problems in real time. How much this will impact the cost of developing complex chips at leading-edge nodes, and in 2.5D and 3D-IC packages, remains to be seen. But the race to both generate data during manufacturing ... » read more

Moore’s Law Now Requires Advanced Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss advanced packaging with Calvin Cheung, vice president of engineering at ASE; Walter Ng, vice president of business management at UMC; Ajay Lalwani, vice president of global manufacturing operations at eSilicon; Vic Kulkarni, vice president and chief strategist in the office of the CTO at ANSYS; and Tien Shiah, senior manager for memory at Samsung. W... » read more

More Memory And Processor Tradeoffs


Creating a new chip architecture is becoming an increasingly complex series of tradeoffs about memories and processing elements, but the benefits are not always obvious when those tradeoffs are being made. This used to be a fairly straightforward exercise when there was one processor, on-chip SRAM and off-chip DRAM. Fast forward to 7/5nm, where chips are being developed for AI, mobile ph... » read more

Power Budgets At 3nm And Beyond


There is high confidence that digital logic will continue to shrink at least to 3nm, and possibly down to 1.5nm. Each of those will require significant changes in how design teams approach power. This is somewhat evolutionary for most chipmakers. Five years ago there were fewer than a handful of power experts in most large organizations. Today, everyone deals with power in one way or another... » read more

New Design Approaches At 7/5nm


The race to build chips with a multitude of different processing elements and memories is making it more difficult to design, verify and test these devices, particularly when AI and leading-edge manufacturing processes are involved. There are two fundamental problems. First, there are much tighter tolerances for all of the components in those designs due to proximity effects. Second, as a re... » read more

Comparative Stochastic Process Variation Bands For N7, N5, And N3 At EUV


By Alessandro Vaglio Preta, Trey Gravesa, David Blankenshipa, Kunlun Baib, Stewart Robertsona, Peter De Bisschopc, John J. Biaforea a) KLA-Tencor Corporation, Austin, TX 78759, U.S.A. b) KLA-Tencor Corporation, Milpitas, CA 95035, U.S.A. c) IMEC, Kapeldreef 75, 3000, BE ABSTRACT Stochastics effects are the ultimate limiter of optical lithography technology and are a major concern for n... » read more

Unsticking Moore’s Law


Sanjay Natarajan, corporate vice president at Applied Materials with responsibility for transistor, interconnect and memory solutions, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about variation, Moore's Law, the impact of new materials such as cobalt, and different memory architectures and approaches. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Reliability is becoming more of an... » read more

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