tag: Lam Research

Scaling CMOS Image Sensors
By Mark LaPedus - 20 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 5

After a period of record growth, the CMOS image sensor market is beginning to face some new and unforeseen challenges. CMOS image sensors provide the camera functions in smartphones and other products, but now they are facing scaling and related manufacturing issues in the fab. And like all chip products, image sensors are seeing slower growth amid the coronavirus outbreak. Manufactured a... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Mark LaPedus - 17 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers TSMC posted mixed results for the quarter, although there was a capital spending surprise. “It maintained its 2020 capex at $15B-$16B despite smartphone softness, primarily to support a strong 5nm ramp, led by demand from 5G and HPC customers,” said Weston Twigg, an analyst at KeyBanc, in a research note. “Despite lowering its industry outlook, TSMC still expects to grow its o... » read more

Making Chips At 3nm And Beyond
By Mark LaPedus and Ed Sperling - 16 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 4

Select foundries are beginning to ramp up their new 5nm processes with 3nm in R&D. The big question is what comes after that. Work is well underway for the 2nm node and beyond, but there are numerous challenges as well as some uncertainty on the horizon. There already are signs that the foundries have pushed out their 3nm production schedules by a few months due to various technical issu... » read more

Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere
By Shelly Miyasato - 16 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

It’s pretty hard to talk about technology today without artificial intelligence, or AI, entering into the conversation. It seems to be everywhere… and growing. Businesses are using it to operate more efficiently, it’s resulting in safer and more useful products, and it has the promise of allowing us to personalize our worlds as devices learn our preferences. The age of AI AI refers to t... » read more

Big Changes In Tiny Interconnects
By Ed Sperling - 16 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 1

One of the fundamental components of a semiconductor, the interconnect, is undergoing radical changes as chips scale below 7nm. Some of the most pronounced shifts are occurring at the lowest metal layers. As more and smaller transistors are packed onto a die, and as more data is processed and moved both on and off a chip or across a package, the materials used to make those interconnects, th... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Mark LaPedus - 10 Apr, 2020 - Comments: 0

Market research The coronavirus pandemic continues to reduce the outlook for worldwide GDP as well as the electronics and IC markets. For example, IC Insights has lowered its IC forecast from 3% to minus 4% in 2020. The IC market is now expected to hit $345.8 billion in 2020, which is $39.0 billion less than the original forecast, which called for an 8% increase this year. Due to the imp... » read more

The Impact Of EUV Resist Thickness On Via Patterning Uniformity
By Benjamin Vincent - 30 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Via patterning at advanced nodes requires extremely low critical dimension (CD) values, typically below 30nm. Controlling these dimensions is a serious challenge, since there are many inherent sources of variation during lithography and etch processing. Coventor personnel, in conjunction with our colleagues from ASML and imec, recently looked at the impact of Extreme Ultraviolet lithography (EU... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test
By Mark LaPedus - 27 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Chipmakers TrendForce has released its projected foundry rankings in terms of sales for the first quarter. TSMC is still in first place, followed by Samsung, GlobalFoundries and UMC. Samsung has been ramping up chips based on its 7nm logic process using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. Now, Samsung is ramping up its DRAM devices using EUV and plans to expand its capacity in the arena.... » read more

Blog Review: March 25
By Jesse Allen - 25 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 0

Rambus' Steven Woo checks out common memory systems that are used in the highest performance AI applications and points to the differences between on-chip memory, HBM, and GDDR. Mentor's Colin Walls considers whether software for embedded systems should be delivered as a binary library or source code and warns of some key potential issues when requesting source code. A Synopsys writer poi... » read more

Memory Issues For AI Edge Chips
By Mark LaPedus - 23 Mar, 2020 - Comments: 3

Several companies are developing or ramping up AI chips for systems on the network edge, but vendors face a variety of challenges around process nodes and memory choices that can vary greatly from one application to the next. The network edge involves a class of products ranging from cars and drones to security cameras, smart speakers and even enterprise servers. All of these applications in... » read more

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