Behind The Mask


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss the current and future photomask manufacturing challenges with Franklin Kalk, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Toppan Photomasks, one of the world’s largest merchant mask makers. SMD: The outlook for the photomask industry is for 2% growth in 2012. Do you agree with that? Kalk: That’s ... » read more

Deep Inside Intel


By Ed Sperling Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down with Mark Bohr, senior fellow at Intel, to talk about a wide range of manufacturing and design issues Intel is wrestling with at advanced nodes—and just how far the road map now extends. SMD: Will EUV make 10nm? And if it doesn’t, what effect will that have on Intel? Bohr: For a process module as critical as lithography... » read more

Return To Claremont


By Barry Pangrle Intel’s Gregory Ruhl gave an update presentation on Intel’s Claremont IA-32 near-threshold voltage (NTV) and wide dynamic range processor at Hot Chips 24. (I’ve also written an earlier article about Claremont here.) There are many challenges in building a part that operates across a broad range of voltages and Intel listed reduced ratios of on-current vs. off-current, re... » read more

You Get What You Want


By Frank Ferro Now that the iPhone 5 hype is quieting down, the discussion has turned to the A6 chip that is powering this must-have device. There is much speculation on what is inside the A6 processor. Is it a dual-core A15 or a custom architecture? Is it a ‘big.LITTLE’ architecture? What speed are cores running at—1.2GHz? Others argue that the graphics processor is of equal importance ... » read more

SPOTLIGHT ON FD-SOI, FINFETS AT IEEE SOI CONFERENCE
;1-4 OCT, NAPA


The 38th annual SOI Conference is coming right up. Sponsored by IEEE Electron Devices Society, this is the only dedicated SOI conference covering the full technology chain from materials to devices, circuits and system applications. Chaired this year by Gosia Jurczak (manager of the Memories Program at imec), this excellent conference is well worth attending. It’s where the giants of the ... » 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

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

Being Different Is Bad


By Ann Steffora Mutschler Today’s SoCs contain as much as 80% existing IP that either has been re-used from previous projects or obtained from a third party. Models are created of this hardware IP, as well as new portions of the design, in order to create a virtual prototype that allows the engineering team to see the complete system by running software and applications. While this a... » read more

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