Chip Industry Week in Review


The IEEE ISSCC conference was held this week in San Francisco. Among the highlights: IBM detailed an AI accelerator based on its new inferencing dataflow architecture. CEA-Leti presented a chip-scale, ultra-fast, battery-operated EPR spectrometer. QuTech introduced a cryo-CMOS SoC with NV centers in diamond. UTokyo showed its low-jitter PLL architecture for beyond 5G/6G. Imec d... » read more

Annual Global IC Fabs And Facilities Report


Semiconductor companies announced a significant number of facilities in 2025 as global onshoring efforts continued across manufacturing, materials, packaging, design, and R&D. Investments came from both industry and government sources. Organizations worked together to solve current technology challenges, including soaring demand for AI chips and advanced memory, as well as complex applic... » read more

Chip Industry Week in Review


Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA warned about power swings and physical damage to power grids increasing from AI training workloads and jointly proposed a multi-pronged approach to stabilize power in AI training data centers. Meanwhile, Anthropic issued a warning about the weaponization of agentic AI in a new 25-page Threat Intelligence report. Key concerns involve the evolution in AI-assisted ... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The chip industry is well on its way to hit $1 trillion in revenue by the end of its decade. Several analyst firms released 2024 annual results and 2025 predictions: Worldwide semiconductor revenue reached $626 billion in 2024, an 18% increase versus 2023, according to preliminary Gartner report. Memory revenue grew about 70%  2024 versus 2023. The firm forecasts that HBM will make up 19%... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Chinese startup DeepSeek rattled the tech world and U.S. stock market with claims it spent just $5.6 million on compute power for its AI model compared to its billion-dollar rivals in the U.S. The announcement raised questions about U.S. investment strategies in AI infrastructure and led to an initial $600 billion selloff of NVIDIA stock. Since its launch, DeepSeek reportedly was hit by malicio... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger retired on Dec. 1, according to the company. He will be replaced by two interim co-CEOs, David Zinsner, who also continues to serve as CFO  and Michelle Johnston Holthaus, who has been named CEO of Intel Products. In addition, Frank Yeary was named interim executive chairman. Intel has been under pressure investors as non-traditional rivals, including Arm and NVIDIA, co... » read more

Full Wafer OCD Metrology


Authored by: Daniel Doutt*a, Ping-ju Chena, Bhargava Ravooria, Tuyen K. Trana, Eitan Rothsteinb, Nir Kampelb, Lilach Tamamb, Effi Aboodyb, Avron Gerb, Harindra Vedalac ABSTRACT Optical Critical Dimension (OCD) spectroscopy is a reliable, non-destructive, and high-throughput measurement technique for metrology and process control that is widely used in semiconductor fabrication facilities (f... » read more

Detection Of Contaminants In Positive And Negative Ion Mode Using In-line SIMS With An Oxygen Primary Ion Beam


Utilizing Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry (SIMS) for in-line metrology is a newly emerging method of process control that requires contamination-free measurements, enabling SIMS on product wafers. SIMS measurements of negative ions are usually associated with a Cesium primary ion beam. Unfortunately, when Cesium is present in Silicon, it forms trap states in the Si band gap, which can cause ser... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


South Korea slashed chip production in February by 17.7% compared to the previous month — 41.8% year-over-year, and the sharpest drop since 2008 — according to figures from South Korea’s National Statistics Office. Inventories were up 33.5%, while exports dropped by 41.6%. China launched a security probe into U.S. memory chipmaker Micron in apparent retaliation for U.S. restrictions on... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


TEL announced plans to build a ¥2.2 billion ($168.2 million) production and logistics center at its Tohoku Office to increase capacity. Construction of the 57,000m² facility, which will be used for manufacturing thermal processing and single-wafer deposition systems, is slated to start in spring 2024, and expected to be completed in fall 2025. Toshiba's board voted in favor of a 2 trillio... » read more

← Older posts