Reliability After Planar Silicon


Negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) poses a very serious reliability challenge for highly scaled planar silicon transistors, as previously discussed. However, the conventional planar silicon transistor appears to be nearing the end of its life for other reasons, too. The mobility of carriers in silicon limits switching speed even as it becomes more difficult to maintain sufficient elec... » read more

The Great Imbalance


The number of options for chipmakers is growing while the number of chipmakers is shrinking. So what does this mean for the semiconductor industry? Short answer: No one is quite sure yet. But a lot more people are beginning to ask that question these days, including investors and analysts. There are a number of factors at play here. To begin with, there are more nodes to choose from than at ... » read more

Inside Samsung’s Foundry Biz


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about the foundry business, process technology, design and other topics with Hong Hao, senior vice president of the foundry business at [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung Semiconductor"]; and Kelvin Low, senior director of foundry marketing at Samsung Semiconductor. What follows are excerpts of that discussion. SE: The foundry business has alway... » read more

Challenges At Advanced Nodes


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss finFETs, 22nm FD-SOI and how the how the market will segment over the next few years with Marie Semeria, CEO of [getentity id="22192" e_name="Leti"]; Patrick Soheili, vice president of product management and corporate development at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Paul Boudre, CEO of Soitec; and Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global ... » read more

Surprises At SEMICON West


As companies such as TSMC and Intel spend less on capital expenditures this year, expectations for SEMICON West 2015 were pretty bleak. I thought I’d have fewer appointments and nothing to really write home about. Au contraire. Although traffic on the show floor was nothing compared to events like CES, there are three things that are driving growth and excitement at semiconductor equipment... » read more

Power Breaks Everything


The emphasis on lowering power in everything from wearable electronics to data centers is turning into a perfect storm for the semiconductor ecosystem. Existing methodologies need to be fixed, techniques need to be improved, and expectations need to be adjusted. And even then the problems won't go away. In the past, most issues involving power—notably current leakage, physical effects such... » read more

Tech Talk: 22nm FD-SOI


Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global design solutions at GlobalFoundries, discusses the evolution of 22nm FD-SOI and its advantages, including single patterning in the middle end of line, 0.4 volt operating voltage, and how it compares to finFETs in terms of performance. [youtube vid=5fa1AcIGcUw] » read more

Moore’s Law Reset?


GlobalFoundries today took the wraps off its 22nm FD-SOI process, promising to extend Moore's Law technologically without altering the economic equation—at least for the next couple of process nodes. Subramani Kengeri, vice president of global design solutions at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"], said 22nm FD-SOI will provide the same 30% improvement in PPA that has been c... » read more

Moore Memory Problems


The six-transistor static memory cell (SRAM) has been the mainstay of on-chip memory for several decades and has stood the test of time. Today, many advanced SoCs have 50% of the chip area covered with these memories and so they are critical to continued scaling. “The SRAM being used in modern systems is similar to the SRAM they were using in the 1970s and 1980s,” says Duncan Bremner, ch... » read more

IP Integration Challenges Increase


Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Chris Rowen, CTO of [getentity id="22032" e_name="Cadence"]'s IP group; Rob Aitken, an [getentity id="22186" comment="ARM"] fellow; Patrick Soheili, vice president of product management and corporate development at [getentity id="22242" e_name="eSilicon"]; Navraj Nandra, senior director of marketing for DesignWare analog and mixed-signal IP at [getentity ... » read more

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