The Road To 5nm


There is strong likelihood that enough companies will move to 7nm to warrant the investment. How many will move forward to 5nm is far less certain. Part of the reason for this uncertainty is big-company consolidation. There are simply fewer customers left who can afford to build chips at the most advanced nodes. Intel bought Altera. Avago bought Broadcom. NXP bought Freescale. GlobalFoundrie... » read more

Next Challenge: Contact Resistance


In chip scaling, there is no shortage of challenges. Scaling the finFET transistor and the interconnects are the biggest challenges for current and future devices. But now, there is another part of the device that’s becoming an issue—the contact. Typically, the contact doesn’t get that much attention, but the industry is beginning to worry about the resistance in the contacts, or conta... » read more

Waiting For 5G Technology


For some time, carriers, equipment OEMs and chipmakers have been gearing up for the next-generation wireless standard called 5th generation mobile networks, or 5G. 5G is the follow-on to the current wireless standard known as 4G, or long-term evolution (LTE). It will enable data transmission rates of more than 10Gbps, or 100 times the throughput of LTE. But the big question is whether 5G wil... » read more

Photonics Moves Closer To Chip


Silicon photonics is resurfacing after more than a decade in the shadows, driven by demands to move larger quantities of data faster, using extremely low power and with minimal heat. Until recently, much of the attention in photonics focused on moving data between servers and storage. Now there is growing interest at the PCB level and in heterogeneous multi-chip packages. Government, academi... » read more

Plotting The Next Semiconductor Road Map


The semiconductor industry is retrenching around new technologies and markets as Moore's Law becomes harder to sustain and growth rates in smart phones continue to flatten. In the past, it was a sure bet that pushing to the next process node would provide improvements in power, performance and cost. But after 22nm, the economics change due to the need for multi-patterning and finFETs, and th... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


MEMS manufacturing A*STAR’s Institute of Microelectronics (IME) in Singapore has launched its third consortium to develop MEMS technologies. This would allow MEMS sensor devices to achieve better performance, higher power efficiency and a smaller form factor. The MEMS Consortium III consists of the following companies: Applied Materials, Coventor, Delta Electronics, GlobalFoundries, InvenS... » read more

Blog Review: June 8


Cadence's Paul McLellan presents Luc van den Hove's keynote at the imec Technology Forum, where he discusses the future of scaling beyond Moore's Law, from going 3D to envisioning new architectures Two years after Heartbleed's disclosure, Synopsys' Robert Vamosi chats with Billy Rios of embedded security company WhiteScope on the continued significance of the OpenSSL vulnerability in a new p... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Through a joint venture with the government of Chongqing, GlobalFoundries will take over an existing 200mm fab in China. Then, GlobalFoundries plans to retrofit the facility and turn it into a 300mm fab. The foundry vendor is transferring its 180nm and 130nm processes to the China fab. Meanwhile, TSMC, UMC and others are also building fabs in China. Samsung Electronics has begu... » read more

Fab Investment Increases In China


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling Fab construction in China is heating up, driven by real and projected demand for IoT devices and the government's push for internally manufactured chips. [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], UMC and [getentity id="22586" comment="TSMC"] are all actively building up fab capacity inside of China, usually in conjunction with other local governme... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools Thermo Fisher Scientific and FEI have announced that their boards of directors have unanimously approved Thermo Fisher’s acquisition of FEI for $107.50 per share in cash. The transaction represents a purchase price of approximately $4.2 billion. In a video, Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, recaps the emerging mask and lithography trends presented at the recent Photomask Ja... » read more

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