The PCB Engineer’s Guide To Successful DDR Bus Design


This paper tackles the critical signal integrity concerns encountered when designing, simulating, and analyzing DDR buses. The first section describes DDR bus design challenges that can be particularly problematic, even intimidating, to designers. Subsequent sections describe how simulation and analysis speed up the design of a functioning DDR system to reduce PCB spins and shorten the time to ... » read more

The Next 5 Years Of Chip Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of scaling, the impact of variation, and the introduction of new materials and technologies, with Rick Gottscho, CTO of Lam Research; Mark Dougherty, vice president of advanced module engineering at GlobalFoundries; David Shortt, technical fellow at KLA-Tencor; Gary Zhang, vice president of computational litho products at ASML; and Shay... » read more

Will China Succeed In Memory?


China's fledging memory makers are expected to reach a major milestone and move into initial production this year, although vendors are already running into various roadblocks. China's domestic vendors are focusing on two markets, 3D NAND and DRAM. In both cases local vendors are either behind in technology, struggling to develop these products, or both. And one vendor recently was hit with ... » read more

Understanding Memory


New semiconductor applications are ever changing and improving our lives, from new smartphones and wearables to healthcare, factory automation, and artificial intelligence. The humble memory chip working in the background plays a critical role in enabling these technologies. For example, that awesome picture you just took would be lost forever without memory. Your computer can’t perform the i... » read more

New Nodes, Materials, Memories


Ellie Yieh, vice president and general manager of Advanced Product Technology Development at [getentity id="22817" e_name="Applied Materials"], and head of the company's Maydan Technology Center, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about challenges, changes and solutions at advanced nodes and with new applications. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How far can w... » read more

ATE Tailwind For 2018?


The automatic test equipment market enjoyed a record sales year during 2017, and there are indications that the good times will continue this year. Forecasters are predicting another robust year for sales of DRAMs and NAND flash memory devices, especially 3D NAND. That will drive demand for memory test equipment to keep up. Frost & Sullivan predicts semiconductor test equipment will h... » read more

Memory Market: Will History Repeat Itself?


While updating the Semico Fab Database and capital investment projections for 2018, China's investment in memory capacity sparked a lot of discussion at our weekly Semico roundtable. Will China's investment in memory production capacity be successful, or will it just ruin the party for all memory players? Here are some of the highlights of our discussion. Additional data and insights are includ... » read more

E-beam Inspection Makes Inroads


E-beam inspection is gaining traction in critical areas in fab production as it is becoming more difficult to find tiny defects with traditional methods at advanced nodes. Applied Materials, ASML/HMI and others are developing new e-beam inspection tools and/or techniques to solve some of the more difficult defect issues in the fab. [gettech id="31057" t_name="E-beam"] inspection is one of tw... » read more

Predictions: Manufacturing, Devices And Companies


Some predictions are just wishful thinking, but most of these are a lot more thoughtful. They project what needs to happen for various markets or products to become successful. Those far reaching predictions may not fully happen within 2018, but we give everyone the chance to note the progress made towards their predictions at the end of the year. (See Reflection On 2017: Design And EDA and Man... » read more

Data Buffering’s Role Grows


Data buffering is gaining ground as a way to speed up the processing of increasingly large quantities of data. In simple terms, a data buffer is an area of physical [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"] storage that temporarily stores data while it is being moved from one place to another. This becomes increasingly necessary in data centers, autonomous vehicles, and for [getkc id="305" kc_name=... » read more

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