The Future Of Transistors And IC Architectures


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. What follows are excerpt... » read more

SVT: Six Stacked Vertical Transistors


This paper presents a new design architecture for advanced logic SRAM cells using six vertical transistors (with carrier transport along the Z direction), stacked one on top of each other. Virtual fabrication technology was used to identify different process integration schemes to enable the fabrication of this architecture with a competitive XY footprint at an advanced logic node: a unit cell ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Government policy For the last four years, the U.S. and China have been embroiled in a trade war, especially on the technology front. The U.S. has implemented a number of export control measures and tariffs in the arena. But there might be a thawing in the tense relationship between the two superpowers. “Reports surfaced Thursday indicating the China Semiconductor Industry Association (CSIA)... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 8


Two-beam EUV lithography At the recent SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Nikon gave a presentation on a two-beam extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography technology. Still in the conceptual phase, Nikon’s so-called EUV Projection Optical Wafer Exposure Ruling Machine, or EUV Power Machine, is designed for the 1nm node or so. The proposed system has a minimum resolution of 10nm for lines ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Government policy The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) this week submitted its final report to Congress and the President. The goal is to develop a national strategy to maintain America’s AI advantages related to national security. As part of the long and complex report, the NSCAI came to a sobering conclusion: “The U.S. government is not prepared to defend t... » read more

The Future Of FinFETs At 5nm And Beyond


While contact gate pitch (GP) and fin pitch (FP) scaling continues to provide higher performance and lower power to finFET platforms, controlling RC parasitics and achieving higher transistor performance at technology nodes of 5nm and beyond becomes challenging. In collaboration with Imec, we recently used SEMulator3D virtual fabrication to explore an end-to-end solution to better underst... » read more

Blog Review: March 3


Siemens EDA's Ray Salemi considers incrementalism in engineering, the transition from drawing circuits to writing RTL, and the next big leap of using proxy-driven testbenches written in Python. Cadence's Shyam Sharma looks at key changes from LPDDR5 in the LPDDR5X SDRAM standard, which extends clock frequencies to include 937MHz and 1066MHz resulting in max data rates of 7500MT/s and 8533 MT... » read more

Blog Review: Feb. 24


Siemens EDA's Harry Foster checks out the efficiency and effectiveness of verification on ASIC and IC designs with a look at how many projects meet the original schedule, the number of required spins, and classification of functional bugs. Cadence's Paul McLellan listens in as Philippe Magarshack of ST Microelectronics on how the company uses massive amounts of data generated by its fabs to ... » read more

Breaking The 2nm Barrier


Chipmakers continue to make advancements with transistor technologies at the latest process nodes, but the interconnects within these structures are struggling to keep pace. The chip industry is working on several technologies to solve the interconnect bottleneck, but many of those solutions are still in R&D and may not appear for some time — possibly not until 2nm, which is expected t... » read more

Evaluation Of The Impact Of Source Drain epi Implementation On Logic Performance Using Combined Process And Circuit Simulation


In this paper, we explore an end-to-end solution using SEMulator3D to address the need to include process variation effects in circuit simulation. For the first time, we couple SEMulator3D with BSIM compact modeling to evaluate process variation impacts on circuit performance. The process integration goal of the study was to optimize contacts and spacer thickness of advanced-node FinFETs in ter... » read more

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