The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers TDK has agreed to acquire MEMS supplier InvenSense for cash at an acquisition price of $13.00 per share, for a total acquisition price of $1.3 billion. Cypress has begun volume shipments of microcontrollers (MCUs) based on its 40nm Embedded Charge-Trap (eCT) flash technology. The MCUs are made on a foundry basis at UMC. UMC’s technology is a 40nm low power (40LP) logic process.... » read more

What’s Missing In Advanced Packaging


Even though Moore's Law is running out of steam, there is still a need to increase functional density. Increasingly, this is being done with heterogeneous integration at the package or module level. This is proving harder than it looks. At this point there are no standardized methodologies, and tools often are retrofitted versions of existing tools that don't take into account the challenges... » read more

5 Takeaways from IEDM


As usual, the recent IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) was a busy week. The event, which took place in San Francisco, featured a plethora of subjects, such as next-generation transistors and memories. The event also included tracks on non-traditional approaches like quantum and neuromorphic computing. And then, there were sessions on power semis and others. In no partic... » read more

Partitioning For Power


Examine any smartphone design today and most of the electronic circuitry is "off" most of the time. And regardless of how many processor cores are available, it's rare to use more than a couple of those cores at any point in time. The emphasis is shifting, though, as the mobility market flattens and other markets such as driver-assisted vehicles and IoT begin gaining traction. In a car, turn... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Samsung Austin Semiconductor plans to invest more than $1 billion in its fab in Austin, Texas. Today, the fab continues to ramp up the company’s 14nm finFET technology. At the same time, Samsung is expanding its advanced finFET foundry process technology offerings with its fourth-generation 14nm process (14LPU) and its third-generation 10nm technology (10LPU). Graphcore is developing a so-... » read more

The Week In Review: Design


IP ARM unveiled a suite of products focused on the IoT, with new processors, radio technology, subsystems, end-to-end security and a cloud-based services platform. Included are Cortex-M23 and Cortex-M33, the first embedded processors based on the ARMv8-M architecture. The Cortex-M33 features configuration options including a coprocessor interface, DSP and floating point computation, while th... » read more

Application Of Overlay Modeling And Control With Zernike Polynomials In An HVM Environment


By JawWuk Ju, MinGyu Kim and JuHan Lee of SK Hynix; Jeremy Nabeth, John C. Robinson and Bill Pierson of KLA-Tencor; and Sanghuck Jeon and Hoyoung Heo of KLA-Tencor Korea. Abstract Shrinking technology nodes and smaller process margins require improved photolithography overlay control. Generally, overlay measurement results are modeled with Cartesian polynomial functions for both intra-field... » read more

Device Overlay Method For High-Volume Manufacturing


By Honggoo Lee, Sangjun Hana and Youngsik Kima of SK Hynix; Myoungsoo Kim, of the Department of Semiconductor System Engineering at Korea University; Hoyoung Heo, Sanghuck Jeon and DongSub Choi, KLA-Tencor Korea; and Jeremy Nabeth, Irina Brinster, Bill Pierson, and John C. Robinson of KLA-Tencor. Abstract Advancing technology nodes with smaller process margins require improved photolithogra... » read more

Stepping Back From Scaling


Architectures, packaging and software are becoming core areas for semiconductor research and development, setting the stage for a series of shifts that will impact a large swath of the semiconductor industry. While there is still demand from the largest chipmakers for increased density at the next process node, the underlying economics for foundries, equipment vendors and IP developers are f... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Market research Worldwide semiconductor capital spending is projected to decline 0.7% in 2016, to $64.3 billion, according to Gartner. This is up from the estimated 2% decline in Gartner's previous quarterly forecast. "Economic instability, inventory excess, weak demand for PC’s, tablets, and mobile products in the past three years has caused slow growth for the semiconductor industry. This ... » read more

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