Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research IC Insights has released its forecast for chips in terms of applications. Communications is still the biggest IC market, but automotive is growing the fastest. In its first forecast of artificial intelligence (AI) edge processors, International Data Corp. (IDC) estimates that worldwide shipments of AI-optimized processors for edge systems will reach 340.1 million units in 20... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Market research In terms of overall IC sales, Intel has replaced Samsung as the number one quarterly semiconductor supplier in 4Q18 after losing the lead spot to Samsung in 2Q17, according to IC Insights. “While Samsung held the full-year number one ranking in 2017 and 2018, Intel is forecast to easily recapture the number one ranking for the full-year of 2019, a position it previously held ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Materials Wesfarmers, an Australian diversified firm, has made an unsolicited bid to acquire Lynas, one of the world’s largest suppliers of rare earths outside of China. Rare earths are chemical elements found in the Earth’s crust. They are used in cars, consumer electronics, computers, communications, clean energy and defense systems. The big market for rare earths is magnets. In semicond... » read more

Week In Review: Design, Low Power


Tools & IP OneSpin Solutions debuted the Hardware Metric Calculation (HMC) App, which uses automatically extracted design information to calculate key hardware metrics to comply with functional safety standards. In particular, it focuses on automotive and autonomous driving SoCs needing to meet the highest functional safety requirements defined by the ISO 26262 standard. The HMC App calcul... » read more

FD-SOI At The Edge


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in the FD-SOI world and what's behind them, with James Lamb, deputy CTO for advanced semiconductor manufacturing and corporate technical fellow at Brewer Science; Giorgio Cesana, director of technical marketing at STMicroelectronics; Olivier Vatel, senior vice president and CTO at Screen Semiconductor Solutions; and Carlos Mazure, CTO at Soi... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers Foxconn is in talks to build a fab in Zhuhai, China, according to a report from Nikkei. The fab, to cost $9 billion, would make chips for Foxconn and outside companies, the report said, which says the company will enter the foundry business. The European Commission has approved funding for 1.75 billion euros ($2 billion) of public investment for projects in the microelectronics... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Chipmakers GlobalFoundries has announced that its advanced silicon-germanium (SiGe) offering is available for prototyping on 300mm wafers. GF’s SiGe technology has been shipping on its 200mm production line in Burlington, Vt. The technology, a 90nm SiGe process, is moving to 300mm wafers at GF’s Fab 10 facility in East Fishkill, N.Y. The SiGe technology is called 9HP. “The increasing ... » read more

Foundries Prepare For Battle At 22nm


After introducing new 22nm processes over the last year or two, foundries are gearing up the technology for production—and preparing for a showdown. GlobalFoundries, Intel, TSMC and UMC are developing and/or expanding their efforts at 22nm amid signs this node could generate substantial business for applications like automotive, IoT and wireless. But foundry customers face some tough choic... » read more

Blog Review: Oct. 24


Arm's Shidhartha Das digs into Power Delivery Networks with a look at how the specific roles of different components work to provide smooth supply conditions. In a video, VLSI Research's Dan Hutcheson chats with D2S CEO Aki Fujimura about the state of the photomask market, EUV optimism, and the most interesting findings from this year's eBeam Initiative survey. Synopsys' Prasad Subudhi K.... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 23


3D stacked finFETs At the upcoming 2018 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), Imec is expected to present a paper on a 3D stacked finFET architecture. IEDM is slated from Dec. 1-5 in San Francisco. Imec’s technology is based what on the R&D organization calls sequential integration. Another R&D organization, Leti, calls it 3D monolithic integration. Regardless, the idea... » read more

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