Making Phones Better


Beneath a smartphone's slick packaging is some interesting, highly sophisticated technology that makes the user experience what it is today. Much of that experience relies on satisfying our ever growing desire for more data capacity for video, social media and the like. Providing that capacity relies on robust filtering to receive just your data stream amongst many nearby other streams. But tha... » read more

What Transistors Will Look Like At 5nm


Chipmakers are currently ramping up 16nm/14nm finFET processes, with 10nm and 7nm just around the corner. The industry also is working on 5nm. TSMC hopes to deliver a 5nm process by 2020. GlobalFoundries, Intel and Samsung are doing R&D for that node. But 5nm technology presents a multitude of unknowns and challenges. For one thing, the exact timing and specs of 5nm remain cloudy. The... » read more

Back-End-of-Line (BEOL) Virtual Patterning With SEMulator3D


Interconnect requirements for the 22nm technology node and beyond, driven by shrinking FEOL geometry, push the limits of unit process tools for BEOL as well as FEOL. Lengthy and costly in-fab experiments are required to ensure that the integrated BEOL process meets local performance and cross-wafer uniformity requirements. Virtual fabrication experiments conducted with SEMulator3D can reduce th... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers At this week’s Flash Memory Summit, Samsung rolled out several new products, including its next-generation 3D NAND device and a solid-state drive (SSD) with capacities up to 32 terabytes. At the same time, Samsung introduced a new and high-performance SSD solution, dubbed the Z-SSD. Samsung’s Z-SSD shares the fundamental structure of V-NAND and has a unique circuit design and... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tools Lam Research’s proposed move to acquire KLA-Tencor has been pushed out for the second time. The deal was supposed to be completed by mid-2016. Then, it was pushed out to the third quarter amid regulatory issues. Now, the companies hope to close the deal by the fourth quarter of 2016. “The KLA-Tencor acquisition is expected to close in the December quarter. This reflects another p... » read more

Pattern Dependence Process Modeling


First order process modeling can help tremendously with process setup and integration challenges that occur in a semiconductor fabrication flow, by visualizing process variation problems “virtually” prior to actual fabrication. In some instances, a deeper level of complexity needs to be added to the process model to capture the effects of variation in the process. Specific examples inclu... » read more

200mm Equipment Shortfall


A surge in demand for consumer electronics, communications ICs, sensors and other products has created a shortage in 200mm fab capacity that shows no signs of abating. None of these chips need to be manufactured using the most advanced processes, and there have been enough tweaks to processes at established nodes to eke even more out of existing processes. But that has left chipmakers strugg... » read more

Virtual Fabrication For MEMS Process Development


MEMS fabrication and design are closely coupled, such that design changes could significantly alter the process flow and vice versa. For instance, setting device parameters such as drive capacitance, deflection distance, or proof mass size directly affects the choice of film thickness, etch rate, sidewall profile and so forth. Typically, this requires multiple iterations of the MEMS design/proc... » read more

Blog Review: July 13


Synopsys' Mansi Chadha looks back at the history of storage and the evolution of SCSI. Cadence's Paul McLellan highlights some of the latest news from the world of neural networks. Mentor's Darrell Teegarden digs into the challenges of modeling fuel cells and walks through how to build one. Ansys' Justin Nescott features a giant, three-instrument music box in his picks for the week's t... » read more

E-beam Vs. Optical Inspection


The wafer inspection business is heating up as chipmakers encounter new and tiny killer defects in advanced devices. Last month ASML Holding entered into an agreement to acquire Hermes Microvision (HMI), the world’s largest e-beam inspection vendor, for $3.1 billion. The proposed move propelled ASML into the e-beam wafer inspection market. In addition, [getentity id="22817" e_name="Appl... » read more

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