Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Intel has announced a definitive agreement to acquire Tower, a specialty foundry vendor, for approximately $5.4 billion. With the acquisition of Tower, Intel expands its efforts in the foundry business, and put its rivals on notice. With Tower, Intel gains access to mature processes as well as specialty technologies, such as analog, CMOS image sensor, MEMS, power management and RF. ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Fabs Intel has announced plans for an initial investment of more than $20 billion in the construction of two new leading-edge fabs in Ohio. Planning for the first two factories will start immediately, with construction expected to begin late in 2022. Production is expected to come online in 2025. As part of the announcement, Air Products, Applied Materials, Lam Research and Ultra Clean Technol... » read more

200mm Shortages May Persist For Years


A surge in demand for chips at more mature process nodes is causing shortages for both 200mm foundry capacity and 200mm equipment, and it shows no signs of letting up. In fact, even with new capacity coming on line this year, shortages are likely to persist for years, driving up prices and forcing significant changes across the semiconductor supply chain. Shortages for both 200mm foundry cap... » read more

Blog Review: Jan. 19


Synopsys' Anand Thiruvengadam examines the memory chip design challenges of optimizing PPA, speeding turnaround time, and improving reliability and how a shift-left approach can help. Cadence's Paul McLellan checks out some of TSMC's recent updates in 3D packaging and the importance of thermal analysis and finding the right balance between IR-drop and TSV usage in multi-chip physical verific... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers TSMC has introduced another version of its 4nm process technology. The process, called N4X, is tailored for high-performance computing products. Recently, TSMC introduced another 4nm process, called N4P, which is an enhanced version of its 5nm technology. N4X is also an enhanced version of its 5nm technology. N4X, however, offers a performance boost of up to 15% over TSMC’s N5 pro... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers China’s Tsinghua Unigroup is in trouble. The group is the parent company of China’s YMTC, a 3D NAND supplier, and other chip ventures. It is close to moving into bankruptcy proceedings. Now, a consortium led by Alibaba has emerged as the frontrunner to take over Tsinghua Unigroup, according to a report from Bloomberg. That deal would keep the company afloat, the report said. ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Apple has introduced its latest MacBook Pro notebooks built around the company’s new, in-house designed processors, dubbed the M1 Pro and M1 Max. The chips, to be incorporated in its 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro systems, are the most powerful devices developed by Apple. The CPUs in the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips deliver up to 70% faster performance than the first M1 device. Based ... » read more

Gearing Up For High-NA EUV


The semiconductor industry is moving full speed ahead to develop high-NA EUV, but bringing up this next generation lithography system and the associated infrastructure remains a monumental and expensive task. ASML has been developing its high-numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV lithography line for some time. Basically, high-NA EUV scanners are the follow-on to today’s EUV lithography systems... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs Intel plans to establish foundry capacity at its fab in Ireland. The company has also launched the so-called Intel Foundry Services Accelerator to help automotive chip designers transition from mature to advanced nodes. The company is setting up a new design team and offering both custom and industry-standard intellectual property (IP) to support the needs of automotive custom... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs At Intel’s Architecture Day this week, the company revealed several new chip architectures. Some were already announced, while others are new. These include Intel’s first performance hybrid architecture, a data center architecture, a discrete gaming graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture, infrastructure processing units (IPUs), and a data center GPU architecture. Here... » read more

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