tag: IBM

x86 Processor Road Map No Longer Just About Speed
By Ed Sperling - 01 Apr, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling The decades-old approach of powerful processors with ever-faster clock speeds is changing. Performance matters in some settings, but the real concern is adding more functionality within power budgets. The most pressing tradeoff is now performance vs. power, which has forced processor architects at AMD, Intel and IBM to take into account everything from application software to... » read more

Directed Self-Assembly Grows Up
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 1

By Mark LaPedus At last year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Christopher Bencher, a member of the technical staff at Applied Materials, said the buzz surrounding directed self-assembly (DSA) technology resembled the fervor generated at the famous Woodstock rock concert in 1969. This was clearly evident from the tumultuous and free-flowing movement that threatened the status quo o... » read more

Swimming In Data
By Ed Sperling - 21 Mar, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling So many warnings about data overload have been issued over the past decade that people generally have stopped paying attention to them. The numbers are so astronomical that increases tend to lose meaning. Nowhere is this more evident than in the semiconductor metrology world, where files are measured in gigabytes. And at each new process node, as the number of transistors a... » read more

Getting Ready For High-Mobility FinFETs
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus The IC industry entered the finFET era in 2011, when Intel leapfrogged the competition and rolled out the newfangled transistor technology at the 22nm node. Intel hopes to ramp up its second-generation finFET devices at 14nm by year’s end, with plans to debut its 11nm technology by 2015. Hoping to close the gap with Intel, silicon foundries are accelerating their efforts t... » read more

Optical Lithography, Take Two
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus It’s the worst-kept secret in the industry. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has missed the initial stages of the 10nm logic and 1xnm NAND flash nodes. Chipmakers hope to insert EUV by the latter stages of 10nm or by 7nm, but vendors are not counting on EUV in the near term and are preparing their back-up plans. Barring a breakthrough with EUV or other technology, IC ... » read more

Multicore Madness
By Mark LaPedus - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Mark LaPedus Smartphones and tablets are migrating towards new and faster application processors, basebands, graphics chips and memories. In the cell-phone chipset area alone, there are a multitude of options and design considerations. Some devices combine the application processor and modem on the same chip. Some are separate devices. In addition, the architectures range from single- to... » read more

Accelerating Moore’s Law
By Ed Sperling - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling Ever since the inception of Moore’s Law, process nodes have moved forward at a rate of once every 18 to 24 months. Companies have been talking about slowing down the rate of progression as things get harder, but at least for the next couple of process nodes something very strange will occur—Moore’s Law will accelerate. The root cause is growing competition for a shrinki... » read more

The Best Foundry Strategy
By Joanne Itow - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

By Joanne Itow Today, foundries supply more than 20% of the silicon used to produce all the semiconductor products sold. The foundry impact has grown from only 10% in 1997 to 24% today. The significance of foundries is even more evident when focused on logic wafers alone. Figure 1. Foundry Wafers as a Percent of Total, IC’s, and IC’s Minus Memory [caption id="attachment_7339" align="... » read more

Making The Right Choices
By Ed Sperling - 21 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

FD-SOI at 28nm, or finFETs at 20/14nm? To companies looking at the cost equation, the total market opportunity for SoCs and the NRE required to get there, this is still a manageable formula. It requires lots of number crunching and some unknowns, but by the time you get done with the math it still falls within an acceptable margin of error and the choices are relatively simple. For foundries... » read more

SOI Highlights at Common Platform Tech Forum
By Various Writers - 19 Feb, 2013 - Comments: 0

Posted by Adele Hars, Editor-in-Chief, Advanced Substrate News ~  ~ The 2013 Common Platform Technology Forum showcased “the latest technological advances being delivered to the world’s leading electronics companies,” so of course SOI-based topics were well-represented. Happily, those of us who weren’t able to get over to Silicon Valley were able to attend “virtually” via a ... » read more

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