Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 14


3D-SOCs At this week’s IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), a plethora of companies, R&D organizations and universities presented papers on the latest and greatest technologies. One of the themes at IEDM is advanced packaging, a technology enables an IC vendor to boost the performance of a chip. Advanced forms of packaging also enables new 3D-like chip architectures. Fo... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 26


GaN finFETs, scaling GaN At the upcoming IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, a slew of entities will present papers on the latest technologies in R&D. The event, to be held Dec. 11–15, involve papers on advanced packaging, CMOS image sensors, interconnects, transistors, power devices and other technologies. At IEDM, Intel will present a paper on a GaN-... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 2


Capacitor-less DRAM At the recent 2020 International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), Imec presented a paper on a novel capacitor-less DRAM cell architecture. DRAM is used for main memory in systems, and today’s most advanced devices are based on roughly 18nm to 15nm processes. The physical limit for DRAM is somewhere around 10nm. DRAM itself is based on a one-transistor, one-capacito... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 31


GaN-on-SOI power semis At the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), Imec and KU Leuven presented a paper on a gallium-nitride (GaN) on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology for use in developing GaN power devices. With GaN-on-SOI technology, researchers have developed a 200-volt GaN power semiconductor device with an integrated driver and fast switching performance. ... » read more

Where Technology Breakthroughs Are Needed


After years of delays, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is finally in production at the 7nm logic node with 5nm in the works. EUV, a next-generation lithography technology, certainly will help chipmakers migrate to the next nodes. But EUV doesn’t solve every problem. Nor does it address all challenges in the semiconductor industry. Not by a long shot. To be sure, the industry needs... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Dec. 16


Imec-Leti alliance At the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), Imec and Leti announced plans to collaborate in select areas. The two R&D organizations plan to collaborate in two areas—artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. Imec and Leti have been separately working on AI technologies based on various next-generation memory architectures. Both entitie... » read more