Where Is Next-Gen Lithography?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss lithography and photomask technologies with Greg McIntyre, director of the Advanced Patterning Department at [getentity id="22217" comment="Imec"]; Harry Levinson, senior fellow and senior director of technology research at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; Uday Mitra, vice president and head of strategy and marketing for the Etch Bu... » read more

Inside The OSAT Business


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the IC-packaging industry, foundries, China and other topics with Tien Wu, chief operating officer at Taiwan's Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), the world's largest outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) vendor. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What is your overall outlook for 2016? Wu: Last year, the semi... » read more

Insider’s Guide To Photomasks


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about photomasks and lithography with Franklin Kalk, executive vice president of technology at Toppan Photomasks, a merchant photomask supplier. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What’s hot in mask technology these days? Kalk: It’s everything from the bleeding-edge like EUV to much more mature manufacturing. On the mature si... » read more

TSMC: Onward to 5nm


TSMC’s financial results for the Q4 of 2015 were released in January and showed an 8.5% revenue drop compared to the previous year, and a 3.5% decrease compared to Q3 (all in NT$). For the full year though, TSMC said it had again achieved record sales, with revenue for the full year up over last year by 10.6% in NT$ (5.7% in US$). President and co-CEO Mark Liu reported that TSMC sees a red... » read more

7nm Lithography Choices


Chipmakers are ramping up their 16nm/14nm logic processes, with 10nm expected to move into early production later this year. Barring a major breakthrough in lithography, chipmakers are using today’s 193nm immersion and multiple patterning for both 16/14nm and 10nm. Now, chipmakers are focusing on the lithography options for 7nm. For this, they hope to use a combination of two technologies ... » read more

The Big Shift


The number of chipmakers that truly can differentiate their products by moving to the next process node is falling, and that pool will continue to shrink even further over the next few years. Processor companies such as Intel and IBM always will benefit from scaling and architectural changes. So will GPU companies such as Nvidia, and FPGA vendors such as Xilinx, Microsemi and Altera (now par... » read more

Fallout From Scaling


By Ed Sperling & Ann Steffora Mutschler Semiconductor scaling is becoming much more difficult and expensive at each new node, creating sharp divisions about what path to take next for which markets and applications. What used to be confined to one or two clear choices is now turning into a menu of items and possibilities, often with no clear guarantees for a successful outcome. Views ... » read more

Industry Road Map Under Construction


While most engineers think in terms of PPA—the classic power, performance and area tradeoffs—their bosses tend to see the world in terms of risk vs. opportunity. Until 22nm, these two objectives moved forward at roughly the same pace, despite the growing technical challenges of fitting more functionality into an SoC. Much has changed since then, and even more will change over the next f... » read more

5nm Fab Challenges


At a recent event, Intel presented a paper that generated sparks and fueled speculation regarding the future direction of the leading-edge IC industry. The company described a next-generation transistor called the nanowire FET, which is a finFET turned on its side with a gate wrapped around it. Intel’s nanowire FET, sometimes called a gate-all-around FET, is said to meet the device require... » read more

Predictions For 2016: Semiconductors, Manufacturing And Design


Seventeen companies sent in their predictions for this year with some of them sending predictions from several people. This is in addition to the CEO predictions that were recently published. That is a fine crop of views for the coming year, especially since they know that they will be held accountable for their views and this year, just like the last, they will have to answer for them. We beli... » read more

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