Foundries See Mixed Future


Amid a tumultuous business environment, the silicon foundry industry is projected to see steady growth in a number of process segments in 2017. As in past years, the foundry market is expected to grow faster than the overall IC industry in 2017. But at the same time, the IC industry—the foundry customer base—continues to witness a frenetic wave of merger and acquisition activity. Basical... » read more

Etching Technology Advances


Let’s get really, really small. That directive from leading semiconductor companies and their customers is forcing the whole semiconductor supply chain to come up with new ways to design and manufacture ever-shrinking dimensions for chips. The current push is to 10nm and 7nm, but R&D into 5nm and 3nm is already underway. To put this in perspective, there are roughly two silicon atom... » read more

Fab Tool Biz Faces Challenges In 2017


After experiencing a gradual recovery and positive growth in 2016, the semiconductor equipment industry sees a mixed picture as well as some uncertainty in 2017. In the near term, though, business is robust. Several chipmakers started to place a sizeable number of fab tool orders in the latter part of 2016, particularly in three areas—3D NAND, logic and foundry. Now, after buying the in... » read more

Reflecting Back on 2016: Markets


Anyone can make a prediction, and sometimes the more outlandish they are the more they get noticed. But at the end of the year some people hit the mark while others may have been way off. Many people simply make projections based on the current trajectory of trends, while others look for the potential discontinuities that may lie ahead. Semiconductor Engineering examines the projections made... » read more

Executive Insight: Charlie Cheng


[getperson id="11073" comment="Charlie Cheng"], CEO of [getentity id="22135" e_name="Kilopass Technology"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the limitations of DRAM, how to get around them, and who's likely to do that. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: What are the top market segments from a [getkc id="22" kc_name="memory"] standpoint? Cheng: The top o... » read more

Tech Talk: Embedded Memories


Dave Eggleston, vice president of embedded memory at GlobalFoundries, talks about the pros and cons of new types of embedded memory, including which work best for certain applications and with various advanced packaging options. [youtube vid=7D9zoA9FFIw] » read more

Sorting Out Next-Gen Memory


In the data center and related environments, high-end systems are struggling to keep pace with the growing demands in data processing. There are several bottlenecks in these systems, but one segment that continues to receive an inordinate amount of attention, if not part of the blame, is the memory and storage hierarchy. [getkc id="92" kc_name="SRAM"], the first tier of this hierarchy, is... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers At this week’s Flash Memory Summit, Samsung rolled out several new products, including its next-generation 3D NAND device and a solid-state drive (SSD) with capacities up to 32 terabytes. At the same time, Samsung introduced a new and high-performance SSD solution, dubbed the Z-SSD. Samsung’s Z-SSD shares the fundamental structure of V-NAND and has a unique circuit design and... » read more

May The Cheapest Memory Win


There are a number of new memory types on the horizon. So why are we still using DRAM, SRAM and hard disk drives developed decades ago? The answer is complicated. Memory, whether it’s on-chip static RAM cache or off-chip dynamic RAM—or flash storage or spinning magnetic media—is really a stack of data storage technologies that need to work seamlessly together and with other non-memory ... » read more

The Future Of Memory


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss future memory with Frank Ferro, senior director of product management for memory and interface IP at [getentity id="22671" e_name="Rambus"]; Marc Greenberg, director of product marketing at [getentity id="22035" e_name="Synopsys"]; and Lisa Minwell, [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]'s senior director of [getkc id="43" kc_name="IP"] marketing.... » read more

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