Chip Industry Week In Review


Global chips sales hit a record $56.9 billion in October, a 22% increase versus October 2023, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Also, global semiconductor equipment billings reached $30.38 billion in Q3 2024, a 19% YoY increase and 13% growth QoQ, SEMI reported. TSMC commenced equipment installation for its 2nm fab in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, six months ahead of schedule. The 2n... » read more

Preparing For Ferroelectric Devices


The discovery of ferroelectricity in materials that are compatible with integrated circuit manufacturing has sparked a wave of interest in ferroelectric devices. Ferroelectrics are materials with a permanent polarization, the direction of which can be switched by an applied field. This polarization can be used to raise or lower the threshold voltage of a transistor, as in FeFETs, or it can c... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Global spending on 300mm fab equipment is expected to reach a record US$400 billion from 2025 to 2027, according to SEMI. Key drivers are the regionalization of semiconductor fabs and the increasing demand for AI chips in data centers and edge devices, with China, South Korea, and Taiwan leading the way. The Biden-Harris Administration launched the National Semiconductor Technology Center’... » read more

Technical Paper Round-Up: July 5


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week. [table id=36 /] Semiconductor Engineering is in the process of building this library of research papers. Please send suggestions (via comments section below) for what else you’d like us to incorporate. If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a good fit for... » read more

One Transistor Process-in-Memory Device Strategy w/ Multi-Functional Multi-Gate One-transistor (MGT) Design of Multiple Electrodes


New technical paper titled "Multi-functional multi-gate one-transistor process-in-memory electronics with foundry processing and footprint reduction" from researchers at Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering (University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Shanghai Institute of Microsystem ... » read more

Making PUFs Even More Secure


As security has become a must-have in most systems, hardware roots of trust (HRoTs) have started appearing in many chips. Critical to an HRoT is the ability to authenticate and to create keys – ideally from a reliable source that is unviewable and immutable. “We see hardware roots of trust deployed in two use models — providing a foundation to securely start a system, and enabling a se... » read more

Thinner Channels With 2D Semiconductors


Moving to future nodes will require more than just smaller features. At 3/2nm and beyond, new materials are likely to be added, but which ones and exactly when will depend upon an explosion of material science research underway at universities and companies around the globe. With field-effect transistors, a voltage applied to the gate creates an electric field in the channel, bending the ban... » read more

A Novel PUF Using Stochastic Short-Term Memory Time of Oxide-Based RRAM for Embedded Applications


Abstract: "RRAM suffers from poor retention with short-term memory time when using low compliance current for programing. However, the short-term memory time exhibits ideal randomness, which can be exploited as an entropy source for physically unclonable function (PUF). In this work, we demonstrated a novel PUF utilizing the stochastic short-term memory time of oxide-based RRAM. The proposed P... » read more

A Machine-Learning-Resistant 3D PUF with 8-layer Stacking Vertical RRAM and 0.014% Bit Error Rate Using In-Cell Stabilization Scheme for IoT Security Applications


Abstract: "In this work, we propose and demonstrate a multi-layer 3-dimensional (3D) vertical RRAM (VRRAM) PUF with in-cell stabilization scheme to improve both cost efficiency and reliability. An 8-layer VRRAM array was manufactured with excellent uniformity and good endurance of >10 7 . Apart from the variation in RRAM resistance, enhanced randomness is obtained thanks to the parasitic IR... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Feb. 8


Transparent sensor Researchers at Osaka University created a thin, flexible, transparent sensor using silver nanowire networks. High-resolution printing was used to fabricate the centimeter-scale cross-aligned silver nanowire arrays, with reproducible feature sizes from 20 to 250 micrometers. As a proof-of-concept for functionality, they used their arrays to detect electrophysiological signals... » read more

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