Quiet, Steady And Sometimes Unexpected Advances For SOI


By Ed Sperling After years of talking about equivalent pricing, technical advantages and consistent processes, silicon on insulator finally appears to be making significant inroads—but not necessarily in ways, places, or even at process nodes where it initially was predicted to gain ground. What’s driving at least some of this change is the semiconductor industry’s progression toward ... » read more

DSA: High Stakes Game Of Alphabet Soup


By Mark LaPedus Directed self-assembly (DSA) is making progress for potential use in semiconductor production, but the industry must make some major advances in a sometimes forgotten and unsung segment—materials. DSA is a complementary patterning technology that makes use of block copolymer materials to enable fine pitches in chip designs. But today’s block copolymers based on poly (MMA... » read more

Universal Memories Fall Back To Earth


By Mark LaPedus Ten years ago, Intel Corp. declared that flash memory would stop scaling at 65nm, prompting the need for a new replacement technology. Thinking the end was near for flash, a number of companies began to develop various next-generation memory types, such as 3D chips, FeRAM, MRAM, phase-change memory (PCM), and ReRAM. Many of these technologies were originally billed as “uni... » read more

Power And Performance: GSS Sees SOI Advantages For FinFETs


Are FinFETs better on SOI? In a series of papers, high-profile blogs and subsequent media coverage,Gold Standard Simulations (aka GSS) has indicated that, yes, FinFETs should indeed be better on SOI. To those of us not deeply involved in the research world, much of this may seem to come out of nowhere.  But there’s a lot of history here, and in this blog we’ll take a look at what it’s... » read more

Keeping The Balance


By Ann Steffora Mutschler The brains of datacenters today are more powerful than ever due to technology advancements in chip architectures and in manufacturing processes that allow more processing power thanks to Moore’s Law. But knowing exactly how and where to configure the processors and cores for optimum throughput and performance within a certain power budget raises a number of qu... » read more

The Limits Of Virtualization


By Ed Sperling The future of virtualization in the corporate data center is firmly established, but questions about the value of virtualization beyond that world remain as fuzzy as the future of many-core systems. While there is no theoretical limit to how many cores can be added into SoCs, there is very little progress in developing applications that can take advantage of all of those core... » read more

Speed Sells


The good news is that the new iPhone battery lasts at least as long as the old one. The bad news is that Apple hasn’t offered double battery life and equivalent performance as an option for mobile users that need extended times between charges. They’re not alone, of course. At the Intel Developer Forum this week, Intel Chief Product Officer Dadi Perlmutter talked about voice and gesture-... » read more

Modeling the Future


Every once in a while I read through the employment listings as part of the Semiconductor Manufacturing group on LinkedIn because I find it fascinating to see what employers are looking for even if I am not applying. Particularly for verification engineering position, one of the job responsibilities typically includes development of the architecture for a functional verification environment ... » read more

IBM’s Power7+ Processor


By Barry Pangrle Hot Chips 24 was held Aug. 27-29 with tutorials on the first day and 30-minute technical presentations plus keynote addresses on the second and third days. There were a lot of great presentations and Hot Chips is definitely one of my favorite conferences. So out of all of the presentations, why did I choose IBM’s Scott Taylor’s on Power7+? Well, it’s likely that I’l... » read more

Ivy Bridge Settles Old Bet


Think back seven years to 2005. Those were boom times with the housing market rising, the dollar high, 65nm node chips on the horizon and EUV the great future lithography hope. EUVL was late for the next (45nm) node, but a great new idea had appeared to fill the gap—water immersion scanning with 193nm exposure! But how far could wet 193nm lithography go before EUVL or some new thing, such as ... » read more

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