Data Analytics To Drive IC Shift


The adoption of predictive analytics has the potential to drive the next round of IC industry innovation and growth. Much of the necessary data handling technology is now available from other sectors. However, to fully capitalize on the possibilities, the IC manufacturing world faces particular challenges in figuring out how to get a high yield of actionable information from its streams of vari... » read more

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

Executive Insight: Aki Fujimura


Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to look at the key issues in lithography and photomasks, as well as the changes taking place in the IC industry. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: The semiconductor market is changing on several fronts. On one front, there is a wave of consolidation in the industry. And then there is a slowdown in... » 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

Pivot Is The New Watchword For Design Automation


Design Automation has been a crucial part of the semiconductor industry for more than 30 years. Without it, keeping up with Moore’s Law would have been impossible. The Design Automation industry accepted the high-risk responsibility for developing the sophisticated software and algorithms at the pace necessary to corral Moore’s Law. In a sense, Design Automation had its own Moore’s la... » read more

The Other Side Of Device Scaling


The push to 10nm and 7nm is a relatively straightforward path in PowerPoint. In multiple presentations across the semiconductor industry, in fact, it has been portrayed as a straight line progression spanning decades. While most chipmakers are aware that the cost per transistor has been increasing below 22nm, due to double patterning and the challenges in designing finFETs and dealing with d... » read more

One-On-One: Dave Hemker


Dave Hemker, CTO at [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to look at some of the key issues on the process and manufacturing side, and some of the key developments that will reshape the semiconductor industry in the future. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: One of the big discussion topics these days is [getkc id="208" commen... » read more

Bulk CMOS Vs. FD-SOI


The leading edge of the chip market increasingly is divided over whether to move to finFETs or whether to stay at 28nm using different materials and potentially even advanced packaging. Decisions about which approach to take frequently boil down to performance, power, form factor, cost, and the maturity of the individual technologies. All of those can vary by market, by vendor and by process... » read more

No More Straight Lines


Shrinking features on a chip is no longer the only way forward, and in an increasing number of designs and markets, it is no longer the best way forward. Power and performance are generally better dealt with using different architectures and microarchitectures, and all of those provide the potential to reduce silicon area (cost). Cramming more transistors on a die and working around leakage... » read more

FinFET Scaling Reaches Thermal Limit


In 1974, Robert H. Dennard was working as an IBM researcher. He introduced the idea that MOSFETs would continue to work as voltage-controlled switches in conjunction with shrinking features, providing doping levels, the chip's geometry, and voltages are scaled along with those size reductions. This became known as Dennard's Law even though, just like Moore's Law, it was anything but a law. T... » read more

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