Big Trouble At 3nm


As chipmakers begin to ramp up 10nm/7nm technologies in the market, vendors are also gearing up for the development of a next-generation transistor type at 3nm. Some have announced specific plans at 3nm, but the transition to this node is expected to be a long and bumpy one, filled with a slew of technical and cost challenges. For example, the design cost for a 3nm chip could exceed an eye-p... » read more

Blog Review: June 20


Mentor's Randy Allen digs into OpenACC, a collection of directives and routines to help a compiler uncover and schedule parallelism, plus an examination of the GCC implementation's performance. Cadence's Paul McLellan takes a look at the shifting opinions on FD-SOI vs. finFET as Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research finds most see the two as complementary technologies in his latest survey. Synop... » read more

FinFET Metrology Challenges Grow


Chipmakers face a multitude of challenges in the fab at 10nm/7nm and beyond, but one technology that is typically under the radar is becoming especially difficult—metrology. Metrology, the art of measuring and characterizing structures, is used to pinpoint problems in devices and processes. It helps to ensure yields in both the lab and fab. At 28nm and above, metrology is a straightforward... » read more

The Challenges Of Process Control On FinFETs And FD-SOI


Across the semiconductor industry, both FD-SOI and finFET transistor technologies are in high volume production, with IC manufacturers looking to extend both technologies to gain additional performance improvements and meet the variety of customer specific technical and economic requirements. In developing the processes needed for the next-generation FD-SOI and finFET technologies, both transis... » read more

Innovative Scalable Design-Based Care Area Methodology For Defect Monitoring In Production


By Ian Tolle, GlobalFoundries, and Ankit Jain, KLA-Tencor Abstract The use of design-based care areas on inspection tools [1, 2] to characterize defects has been well established in recent years. However, the implementation has generally been limited to specific engineering use cases, due to the complexity involved with care area creation and inspection recipe setup. Furthermore, creating, ... » read more

Criticality of Wafer Edge Inspection and Metrology Data to All-Surface Defectivity Root Cause and Yield Analysis


Abstract As device sizes continue to increase on devices at 2x nm design rule and beyond and high wafer stress is worsening due to multi-film stacking in the vertical memory process, we observe an increasing trend in edge yield issues worldwide. Wafer edge inspection and metrology become thus critical to drive root cause analysis for improving the yield during a new technology ramp. Nowadays, ... » read more

Searching For EUV Defects


Chipmakers hope to insert extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography at 7nm and/or 5nm, but several challenges need to be solved before this oft-delayed technology can be used in production. One lingering issue that is becoming more worrisome is how to find defects caused by [gettech id="31045" comment="EUV"] processes. These processes can cause random variations, also known as stochastic effects... » read more

The Next 5 Years Of Chip Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of scaling, the impact of variation, and the introduction of new materials and technologies, with Rick Gottscho, CTO of [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"]; Mark Dougherty, vice president of advanced module engineering at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; David Shortt, technical fellow at [getentity id="22876" co... » read more

What the Experts Think


Coventor recently sponsored an expert panel discussion at IEDM 2017 to discuss how we might advance the semiconductor industry into the next generation of technology. The panel discussed alternative methods to solve fundamental problems of technology scaling, using advances in semiconductor architectures, patterning, metrology, advanced process control, variation reduction, co-optimization and ... » read more

The Next 5 Years Of Chip Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the future of scaling, the impact of variation, and the introduction of new materials and technologies, with Rick Gottscho, CTO of [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"]; Mark Dougherty, vice president of advanced module engineering at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; David Shortt, technical fellow at [getentity id="22876" co... » read more

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