The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers As reported, Samsung is expanding its efforts in the foundry business, a move that will put the company on a collision course with TSMC and others. Samsung's foundry unit is expanding is logic portfolio and moving into the specialty foundry front. It will also make its advanced packaging technology available, such as 2.5D interposers, to customers. In a blog, Samsung said it plans t... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers TSMC remained the world’s largest foundry vendor with a 54.3% share in 2015, according to the rankings from Gartner. GlobalFoundries moved into the No. 2 position with 9.6% of the market. The No. 3 position went to UMC with $4.5 billion in revenue, representing 9.3% of the market, according to the firm, which said Samsung remains No. 4. SMIC, which is No. 5, is gaining ground. ... » read more

It’s All About DRAM


For decades, the starting point for compute architectures was the processor. In the future, it likely will be the DRAM architecture. Dynamic random access memory always has played a big role in computing. Since IBM's Robert Dennard invented DRAM back in 1966, it has become the gold standard for off-chip memory. It's fast, cheap, reliable, and at least until about 20nm, it has scaled quite n... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Fab tool vendors In terms of sales for 2015, Applied Materials retained the No. 1 position in the wafer fab equipment (WFE) market with 1.3% growth last year, according to Garnter. Lam Research experienced the strongest growth of the top 10 vendors in 2015, moving into the No. 2 position. In the rankings, Lam jumped ahead of ASML and TEL. ASML was in third place, followed in order by TEL, KLA-... » read more

How Many Cores? (Part 2)


New chip architectures and new packaging options—including fan-outs and 2.5D—are changing basic design considerations for how many cores are needed, what they are used for, and how to solve some increasingly troublesome bottlenecks. As reported in part one, just adding more cores doesn't necessarily improve performance, and adding the wrong size or kinds of cores wastes power. That has s... » read more

Timing Is Everything


It's easy to look back on companies or products that missed the market because they were too early. Remember the Eo? The brick-like personal digital assistant that AT&T introduced in 1993 had an antenna that hinted at 4G connectivity. Unfortunately, there was no 4G available at the time, so it was just an extra wire. (Check out the video of the tablet version here.) The EO 440 Personal... » read more

Multi-Beam Market Heats Up


The multi-beam e-beam mask writer business is heating up, as Intel and NuFlare have separately entered the emerging market. In one surprising move, [getentity id="22846" e_name="Intel"] is in the process of acquiring IMS Nanofabrication, a [gettech id="31058" t_name="multi-beam e-beam"] equipment vendor. And separately, e-beam giant NuFlare recently disclosed its new multi-beam mask writer t... » read more

New Memory Approaches And Issues


New memory types and approaches are being developed and tested as DRAM and Moore's Law both run out of steam, adding greatly to the confusion of what comes next and how that will affect chip designs. What fits where in the memory hierarchy is becoming less clear as the semiconductor industry grapples with these changes. New architectures, such as [getkc id="202" kc_name="fan-outs"] and [getk... » read more

Is 2.5D Cheaper?


For the past several years, as 2.5D was being tested, the most common response from chipmakers and tools vendors was that the interposer used to connect various die in a package was far too expensive. It was basically the same argument as mask costs are rising too high to continue building complex planar SoCs at 16/14nm, or that FD-SOI is more expensive than bulk silicon at 28nm. The critici... » read more

What’s Next For DRAM?


The DRAM business has always been challenging. Over the years, DRAM suppliers have experienced a number of boom and bust cycles in a competitive landscape. But now, the industry faces a cloudy, if not an uncertain, future. On one front, for example, [getkc id="93" kc_name="DRAM"] vendors face a downturn amid a capacity glut and falling product prices in 2016. But despite the business chal... » read more

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