The Week In Review: Manufacturing


GlobalFoundries’ campus in upstate New York employs over 2,200 workers. It is looking to add 600-800 more people by the end of 2014. The company is seeking out engineers with four-year degrees and technicians with associates degrees. It is also bringing in engineers from IBM to ramp its fab in New York. Applied Materials introduced the Endura Ventura PVD system that helps reduce the cost o... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


About 150 to 200 employees from IBM’s chip unit will be dispatched to work at GlobalFoundries, according to the Poughkeepsie Journal. GlobalFoundries said the arrangement is temporary, according to the report. GlobalFoundries is the leading candidate to buy IBM’s chip unit, which is apparently on the block. To date, however, GlobalFoundries and IBM have yet to make any announcements on the... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: May 20


Brain chips Pennsylvania State University has developed a technology that could enable futuristic biochips, namely those that mimic the human brain. In the lab, Penn State combined a thin film of vanadium dioxide (VO2) on a titanium dioxide substrate to create an oscillating switch. VO2 is an exotic material that exhibits semiconductor-to-metal transitions at 68 °C. In the R&D stage fo... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


IC Insights has released its rankings of the Q1 ‘14 top 25 semiconductor suppliers. Outside of the top five spots, there were numerous changes. MediaTek jumped up four positions. Also, last year’s Micron/Elpida merger created a new giant semiconductor company with Micron’s sales expected to be over $17 billion this year. Toshiba will demolish the No. 2 semiconductor fabrication facilit... » read more

Shootout At 28nm


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus Samsung, Soitec and STMicroelectronics are joining forces on 28nm FD-SOI, creating a showdown with TSMC and others over the best single-patterned processes and materials and raising questions about how quickly companies need to move to the finFET technology generation. The multi-source manufacturing collaboration agreement for fully depleted silicon-on-insulato... » read more

The Bumpy Road To FinFETs


The shift from planar transistors to finFETs is a major inflection point in the IC industry. FinFETs are expected to enable higher performance chips at lower voltages. And the next-generation transistor technology also could allow the industry to extend CMOS to the 10nm node and perhaps beyond. But as it turns out, finFET technology is also harder to master than previously thought. For exam... » read more

A Node By Any Other Name


Have you ever wondered what gives a particular CMOS technology node its name? When we talk about 20nm, 16nm or 14nm, what exactly does that number in front of the “nm” mean anyway? Is it the first layer metal half-pitch or the gate length (and while we’re at it, is that the printed gate length, the physical gate length, or the effective gate length)? The half-pitch refers to half the m... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung Electronics announced that its memory fabrication line in Xi’an China has begun full-scale manufacturing operations. The new facility will manufacture Samsung’s advanced NAND flash memory chips, dubbed 3D V-NAND. A recent chemical leak at Intel’s fab in Arizona was contained and two workers were taken to a hospital for observation, according to reports. Apparently, Intel was i... » read more

FinFET Learning


FinFETs are not simple to work with. They’re difficult to manufacture, tricky to design, and they run the risk of greatly increased dynamic power density—particularly at 14/16nm, where extra margin is hard to justify—which affects everything from electromigration to signal integrity. Moreover, while finFETs have been on the drawing board for more than a decade, it’s taken four years ... » read more

Follow The Investments


Where is design heading over the next few years. The best way to tell that is to find out where the development dollars are going, and foundries and tools always precede actual designs. The foundries are starting to spend money—lots of it—on finFETs and 28nm. And while they’re talking about 2.5D and 3D, the money isn’t going there just yet. In fact, there are two different processes ... » read more

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