Chip Industry Week In Review


Europe's top court ruled in Intel's favor, voiding a $1.1 billion fine imposed by the European Union and dismissing charges of anti-competitive behavior. IBM released yield benchmarks for high-NA EUV, which serve as proof points that the newest advanced litho equipment will enable scaling beyond the 2nm process node. Also on the lithography front, Nikon is developing a maskless digital litho... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


By Adam Kovac, Karen Heyman, and Liz Allan.  China introduced strict procurement guidelines aimed at blocking the use of AMD and Intel processors in government computers. Meanwhile, China urged the Netherlands to ease restrictions on deep ultraviolet (DUV) litho equipment, according to Nikkei Asia. DUV is an older technology, based on 193nm ArF lasers, but in conjunction with multi-p... » read more

Center For Deep Learning In Electronics Manufacturing: Bringing Deep Learning To Production For Photomask Manufacturing


The Center for Deep Learning in Electronics Manufacturing (CDLe) was formed as an alliance between D2S, Mycronic and NuFlare Technology in autumn 2018. Assignees from each alliance partner worked with deep learning (DL) experts under the leadership of Ajay Baranwal, director of CDLe. The CDLe’s mission was to 1) turn DL into a core competency inside each of the companies and 2) do DL projects... » read more

Photomask Shortages Grow At Mature Nodes


A surge in demand for chips at mature nodes, coupled with aging photomask-making equipment at those geometries, are causing significant concern across the supply chain. These issues began to surface only recently, but they are particularly worrisome for photomasks, which are critical for chip production. Manufacturing capacity is especially tight for photomasks at 28nm and above, driving up ... » read more

The Right Project Is Key For Photomask Adoption Of Deep Learning


Deep learning (DL) has become an integral part of the success of many companies. There have been many papers and some reported successes in semiconductor manufacturing, yet only 22% of the luminaries participating in the 2021 eBeam Initiative Luminaries survey see DL as a competitive advantage for photomask making by next year, as shown in figure 1. Looking at that chart, the luminaries believe... » read more

Luminaries See Growth Opportunities For Photomask Writers


Multi-beam mask writers (MBMWs) are the new kid on the block of the photomask writers, so growth predictions aren’t surprising. In fact, 90% of the industry luminaries surveyed by the eBeam Initiative think that new MBMW purchases will increase over the next three years, as shown in figure 1. Looking at that chart, industry luminaries predict sales of new photomask writers to increase across ... » read more

Semiconductor Photomask Revenues Predicted To Increase In 2021


A majority (72%) of industry luminaries surveyed in July predict an increase in photomask revenues for 2021, as shown in figure 1. SEMI also predicts revenues to increase around 9% from $4.4B in 2020 to $4.8B in 2021. In a 12-minute video, a panel of experts share their perspectives on what’s behind the growth trend, how the pandemic has impacted the photomask industry, and how it compares to... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers AMD has rolled out its new MI200 series products, the first exascale-class GPU accelerators. Using a fan-out bridge packaging technology, the MI200 series are designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The MI200 series accelerators feature a multi-die GPU architecture with 128GB of HBM2e memory. Typically, the HBM2e memory stack a... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research For some time, the semiconductor industry has experienced acute shortages. The automotive industry has suffered the most. When will this all end? “Shortages have become more acute for many products in the near term because the growth in demand is greater than the increase in wafer and packaging capacity that was anticipated by the foundry and semiconductor vendors. To date... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers, OEMs At Intel’s Architecture Day this week, the company revealed several new chip architectures. Some were already announced, while others are new. These include Intel’s first performance hybrid architecture, a data center architecture, a discrete gaming graphics processing unit (GPU) architecture, infrastructure processing units (IPUs), and a data center GPU architecture. Here... » read more

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