A Call To Action: How 20nm Will Change IC Design


The 20nm process node represents a turning point for the electronics industry. While it brings tremendous power, performance and area advantages, it also comes with new challenges in such areas as lithography, variability, and complexity. The good news is that these become manageable challenges with 20nm-aware EDA tools when they are used within end-to-end, integrated design flows based on a �... » read more

Uncommon Goals


I had the opportunity to attend the Common Platform event recently. This is a technology and business showcase sponsored by Global Foundries, IBM and Samsung with major support from ARM, Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor. Wow, that’s some serious sponsorship. The event was well run and provided a good balance of technology details and business outlook. The wine at the evening reception was decent ... » read more

Tech Talk: Getting To The Next Node


IBM's Gary Patton talks with Low-Power/High-Performance Engineering about finFETs, EUV, and the challenges of staying on the Moore's Law road map. [youtube vid=jtz9XSXyBp0] » read more

Increasing Levels Of Risk


Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sits down with Mentor Graphics' Jean-Marie Brunet to talk about double patterning, finFETs, design rules at advanced nodes and why design for manufacturing (DFM) has suddenly become so popular. [youtube vid=3GHvikyjZow] » read more

Why Do My DP Colors Keep Changing?


By David Abercrombie At 20nm, foundries are using several different double patterning design flows. One of the more common flows does not actually require the design team to decompose their layers into two colors. The designer only has to verify that the design can be decomposed before taping out each single layer. There are certain obvious advantages to this flow. For example, the designer do... » read more

Experts At The Table: Issues In Lithography


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future lithography challenges with Juan Rey, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Aki Fujimura, chairman and chief executive at D2S; and Tatsuo Enami, general manager for the sales division at Gigaphoton. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. (Part one can be found here.) SMD: Let’s re-vi... » read more

Experts At The Table: Issues In Lithography


By Mark LaPedus Semiconductor Manufacturing & Design sat down to discuss future lithography challenges with Juan Rey, senior director of engineering at Mentor Graphics; Aki Fujimura, chairman and chief executive at D2S; and Tatsuo Enami, general manager for the sales division at Gigaphoton. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SMD: What are the big challenges in lithography?... » read more

ASML to Buy Cymer


"We have experienced some delay in EUV, basically caused by delays in developing the light source", said Peter Wennink, ASML's financial chief. With that understatement, ASML succinctly explained its rationale for offering $2.6B in cash (25%) and stock (75%) to buy San Diego-based Cymer, the leading developer of EUV sources.  Over the last year, ASML has sent about 500 of their engineers to... » read more

A Mischievous Muse


By Marc David Levenson Moorissa, the muse of high technology, enjoys playing practical jokes on the mask-makers, whose annual meeting was the week of Sept. 10 in Monterey. It started long ago…For example, no sooner had mask makers learned how to write precise 1X masks with fancy electron beams than the wafer printing industry went to reduction steppers, negating the advantages of all that pr... » read more

A Hybrid Model/Pattern-Based OPC Approach For Improved Consistency And TAT


As the technology advances, OPC run time turns to be a big concern, and a great deal of our effort is directed toward speeding up the litho operations. In addition, the OPC simulation consistency sometimes deteriorates, which is a critical issue—especially for anchor features. On the other hand, full-chip designs usually comprise large arrays of basic cells, used by OPC engineers to tune OPC ... » read more

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