Reflections On 2015


It is easy to make predictions, but few people can make them with any degree of accuracy. Most of the time, those predictions are forgotten by the end of the year and there is no one to do a tally of who holds more credibility for next year. Not so with SemiEngineering. We like to hold people's feet to the fire, but while the Pants-On-Fire meter may be applicable to politicians, we like to thin... » read more

Inside Inspection And Metrology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about inspection, metrology and other issues with Mehdi Vaez-Iravani, vice president of advanced imaging technologies at Applied Materials. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Today, the industry is working on a new range of complex architectures, such as 3D NAND and finFETs. For these technologies, the industry is clearly struggling... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung plans to make a major entry into the drone market, according to reports. “Samsung is not alone in focusing on the drone market,” said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts, in a research note. “At CES next month in Las Vegas, one can expect new products from drone market leader DJI, but dozens of new drone models from Parrot and many other companies. Even GoPro chip maker A... » read more

Foundries Face Challenges in 2016


Generally, 2015 has been a challenging year in the foundry business. For one thing, the foundry industry will register modest growth in 2015. In addition, the foundry customer base is consolidating. And on the leading edge, foundries took longer than expected to ramp up their 16nm/14nm finFET processes. So, after an eventful year in 2015, what’s in store for the foundry business in 2016? I... » read more

The Next Resists…Continued


As previously discussed, conventional chemically-amplified resists are struggling to balance the competing requirements of EUV lithography. Simultaneously meeting the industry’s targets for resolution, sensitivity, and line-edge roughness may require new resist concepts. Inpria’s resist technology, based on tin-oxide nano clusters, is one possibility. Recently published work at SUNY Albany ... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 15


DRAM scaling sans EUV At the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Washington, D.C., chipmakers presented papers on several technologies, including one unlikely topic—DRAM scaling. For years, it was believed that DRAMs would hit the wall and stop scaling at 20nm or so. Then, at that point, the industry would need to migrate to a 3D DRAM structure or a next-generatio... » read more

The Pain Of Change


If the still evolving shift left has taught the semiconductor industry anything, it's that nothing can be counted on to stay the same for very long. The basic proposition of doing more earlier in the design cycle to speed up time to market—and thereby shifting everything left in the linear flow—means that every silo that has been constructed over the past several decades needs to be rethoug... » read more

Can Nano-Patterning Save Moore’s Law?


For years the academic community has explored a novel technology called selective deposition. Then, more than a year ago, Intel spearheaded an effort to bring the technology from the lab to the fab at 7nm or 5nm. Today, selective deposition is still in R&D, but it is gaining momentum in the industry. With R&D funding from Intel and others, selective deposition, sometimes called ALD-e... » read more

Inside Multi-Beam E-Beam Lithography


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with David Lam, chairman of Multibeam, a developer of multi-beam e-beam tools for direct-write lithography applications. Lam is also a venture capitalist. He founded Lam Research in 1980, but left as an employee in 1985. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: How has the equipment business changed over the years and what’s the state of the i... » read more

What’s Really Causing Line-Edge Roughness?


As previously discussed, shot noise is an important contributor to line edge roughness. However, as the title of one paper on the subject put it, “Do not always blame the photons.” The line edge roughness of a chemically amplified resist ultimately depends on photoacid generation and the deprotection of the resist’s base monomers. Photons absorbed by the resist simply trigger a chain ... » read more

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