Semiconductor Test In The Gate All Around Era


The past two years have witnessed unprecedented growth in the semiconductor industry, driven by advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, automated vehicles, and augmented and virtual reality. All of these applications depend heavily on advancements in semiconductors to meet their needs for enormous computational processing and communication bandwidth to makes sense of t... » read more

Precision Selective Etch And The Path To 3D


Scaling (the shrinking of the tiny devices in chips such as transistors and memory cells) has never been easy, but making the next generation of advanced logic and memory devices a reality requires creating new structures at the atomic scale. When working with dimensions this small, there is little room for variation. Compounding the problem is a need to remove material isotropically, or, un... » read more

Precision Selective Etch Tools Pave The Way For The Next Technology Inflection


Over the past decade, the need for increasingly smaller, denser, more powerful chips has been driving semiconductor manufacturers to move away from planar structures in favor of increasingly complex three-dimensional (3D) structures. Why? Simply put, stacking elements vertically enables greater density. Use of 3D architectures to support advanced logic and memory applications represents the ... » read more

Inner Spacer Engineering to Improve Mechanical Stability in Channel-Release Process of Nanosheet FETs


  Abstract "Mechanical stress is demonstrated in the fabrication process of nanosheet FETs. In particular, unwanted mechanical instability stemming from gravity during channel-release is covered in detail by aid of 3-D simulations. The simulation results show the physical weakness of suspended nanosheets and the impact of nanosheet thickness. Inner spacer engineering based on geometr... » read more

Advancing To The 3nm Node And Beyond: Technology, Challenges And Solutions


It seems like yesterday that finFETs were the answer to device scaling limitations imposed by shrinking gate lengths and required electrostatics. The introduction of finFETs began at the 22nm node and has continued through the 7nm node. Beyond 7nm, it looks like nanosheet device structures will be used for at least the 5nm and probably the 3nm nodes. The nanosheet device structure is the brainc... » read more

Angstrom-Level Measurements With AFMs


Competition is heating up in the atomic force microscopy (AFM) market, where several vendors are shipping new AFM systems that address various metrology challenges in packaging, semiconductors and other fields. AFM, a small but growing field that has been under the radar, involves a standalone system that provides surface measurements on structures down to the angstrom level. (1 angstrom = 0... » read more

The Increasingly Uneven Race To 3nm/2nm


Several chipmakers and fabless design houses are racing against each other to develop processes and chips at the next logic nodes in 3nm and 2nm, but putting these technologies into mass production is proving both expensive and difficult. It's also beginning to raise questions about just how quickly those new nodes will be needed and why. Migrating to the next nodes does boost performance an... » read more

FinFETs Give Way To Gate-All-Around


When they were first commercialized at the 22 nm node, finFETs represented a revolutionary change to the way we build transistors, the tiny switches in the “brains” of a chip. As compared to prior planar transistors, the fin, contacted on three sides by the gate, provides much better control of the channel formed within the fin. But, finFETs are already reaching the end of their utility as... » read more

A Paradigm Shift With Vertical Nanowire FETs For 5nm And Beyond


When I was in undergrad not so long ago, all my circuits and semiconductor textbooks/professors were talking about MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor) that were just “better” than BJTs (bi-polar junction transistor). There were still some old professors talking about how they did an excellent job using BJTs, but everyone knew it was MOSFET that was leading the game i... » read more

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