Executive Insight: Lip-Bu Tan


Lip-Bu Tan, president and CEO of Cadence, opens up on the next big things, what will drive them, and what will change to make that happen. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: What are the biggest changes in the semiconductor industry over the past year? Tan: The whole system approach to designing hardware and software is really happening now. It will continue to expand fr... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Through a joint venture with the government of Chongqing, GlobalFoundries will take over an existing 200mm fab in China. Then, GlobalFoundries plans to retrofit the facility and turn it into a 300mm fab. The foundry vendor is transferring its 180nm and 130nm processes to the China fab. Meanwhile, TSMC, UMC and others are also building fabs in China. Samsung Electronics has begu... » read more

FinFET Scaling Reaches Thermal Limit


In 1974, Robert H. Dennard was working as an IBM researcher. He introduced the idea that MOSFETs would continue to work as voltage-controlled switches in conjunction with shrinking features, providing doping levels, the chip's geometry, and voltages are scaled along with those size reductions. This became known as Dennard's Law even though, just like Moore's Law, it was anything but a law. T... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights released its foundry rankings in terms of sales in 2015. TSMC was the leader with $26.4 billion in sales last year. Second ranked GlobalFoundries, which took over IBM’s IC business in 2015, made some gains. With IBM’s chip unit, GlobalFoundries’ quarterly sales in 4Q ‘15 were about $1.4 billion, an annual run-rate of $5.6 billion, about 12% greater than the compa... » read more

Next EUV Challenge: Pellicles


Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is still not ready for high-volume manufacturing, but the technology is at least moving in the right direction. Both the [gettech id="31045" comment="EUV"] light source and resists are making noticeable progress, even though there are still challenges in the arena. And then, there is the EUV mask infrastructure, which also has some gaps. “When EUV i... » read more

7nm Fab Challenges


Leading-edge foundry vendors have made the challenging transition from traditional planar processes into the finFET transistor era. The first [getkc id="185" kc_name="finFETs"] were based on the 22nm node, and now the industry is ramping up 16nm/14nm technologies. Going forward, the question is how far the finFET can be scaled. In fact, 10nm finFETs from Samsung are expected to ramp by ye... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system from IBM. A single TrueNorth processor from IBM consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons. The chip is fabricated based on a 28nm LPP pro... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 29


Brain-inspired computing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses. It will consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer. ... » read more

GPU-Based Computing In Photomask Manufacturing


Graphical-processing unit (GPU)-accelerated computing has reached maturity for professional, scientific computing applications. One example of this is the recent GPU-accelerated thermal application for semiconductor photomask manufacturing, which is used in 24/7 manufacturing environments. GPU-accelerated computing won’t be a universal panacea for the semiconductor industry’s “need for sp... » read more

A Formal Transformation


A very important change is underway in functional verification. In the past, this was an esoteric technology and one that was difficult to deploy. It was relegated to tough problems late in the verification cycle, and it was difficult to justify the ROI unless the technology actually did find some problems. But all of that has changed. Formal verification companies started to use the technology... » read more

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