Building CFETs With Monolithic And Sequential 3D


Successive versions of vertical transistors are emerging as the likely successor to finFETs, combining lower leakage with significant area reduction. A stacked nanosheet transistor, introduced at N3, uses multiple channel layers to maintain the overall channel length and necessary drive current while continuing to reduce the standard cell footprint. The follow-on technology, the CFET, pushes... » read more

Power Semis Usher In The Silicon Carbide Era


Silicon carbide production is ramping quickly, driven by end market demand in automotive and price parity with silicon. Many thousands of power semiconductor modules already are in use in electric vehicles for on-board charging, traction inversion, and DC-to-DC conversion. Today, most of those are fabricated using silicon-based IGBTs. A shift to silicon carbide-based MOSFETs doubles the powe... » read more

Goals of Going Green


The chip industry is stepping up efforts to be seen as environmentally friendly, driven by growing pressure from customers and government regulations. Some manufacturers have been addressing sustainability challenges for more than a decade, but they are becoming more aggressive in their efforts, while others are joining them. A review of sustainability reports across the semiconductor indust... » read more

Will CFETs Help The Industry Go Vertical?


Device scaling is getting much harder at each new process node. Even defining what it means is becoming a challenge. In the past, gate length and metal pitch went down and device density went up. Today, this is much harder for several reasons: • Short channel effects limit gate-length scaling; • Parasitic effects limit device density, and • Metal resistance limits metal pitch. So r... » read more

Startup Funding: February 2023


The cost of borrowing is going up, but investors continued to pour money into the chip industry in February. Collectively, 132 companies raised more than $4.5 billion last month. One of the big beneficiaries was quantum computing, with nine companies drawing a total of more than $500 million. The bulk of that went to a quantum software and services company spun out of Alphabet, but plenty wa... » read more

The March Toward Chiplets


The days of monolithic chips developed at the most advanced process nodes are rapidly dwindling. Nearly everyone working at the leading edge of design is looking toward some type of advanced packaging using discrete heterogeneous components. The challenge now is how to shift the whole chip industry into this disaggregated model. It's going to take time, effort, as well as a substantial reali... » read more

Chip Industry’s Technical Paper Roundup: Dec. 13


New technical papers added to Semiconductor Engineering’s library this week.[table id=70 /] If you have research papers you are trying to promote, we will review them to see if they are a good fit for our global audience. At a minimum, papers need to be well researched and documented, relevant to the semiconductor ecosystem, and free of marketing bias. There is no cost involved for us po... » read more

New Method to Measure, At The Wafer Scale, Direct Bonding Energies (CEA-LETI)


A new technical paper titled "Double cantilever beam bonding energy measurement using confocal IR microscopy" was published by researchers at Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA-LETI and SOITEC, Parc Technologique des Fontaines. "A new technique is assessed in order to measure, at the wafer scale, direct bonding energies. It is derived from the standard Double Cantilever Beam (DCB) method and uses int... » read more

Startup Funding: July 2022


Quantum computing may seem like a futuristic technology, but computation based on superposition and entanglement is here and investors are eager to get behind it. Two of July's rounds that passed the $100 million mark were for superconducting quantum processor companies, one of which is also developing EDA software to assist in designing quantum circuits. And it's not just mega-rounds. Two quan... » read more

Wafer Shortage Improvement In Sight For 300mm, But Not 200mm


The supply chain for bare wafers is off-kilter. Demand is appreciably higher than the wafer suppliers can keep up with, creating shortages that could last for years. For 300mm starting wafers, the top five big players — SEH and Sumco of Japan, Siltronic of Germany, GlobalWafers of Taiwan, and SK Siltron of Korea — finally took action over the last year, spending billions on new wafer fac... » read more

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