SEMICON West Preview

By SEMI - 19 May, 2014 - Comments: 0

By Paula Doe The fast growing demand for bandwidth is driving telecomm and data center user interest in moving high speed optical connections closer and closer to the chips, as recent advances in packaging technology, from microbumping to bonding to wafer-level redistribution now help make it possible. Chip-to-chip and chip-to-board optical connections increasingly look like a viable soluti... » read more

Taming The PDK Beast At DAC

By Steve Schulz - 19 May, 2014 - Comments: 0

A quick Web search on the phrase “process design kit” reveals about 48 million matches. This happens to be about 10 times larger than for the current pop dance sensation “twerking,” so I guess that’s at least something to brag about. Yet if we now add the word interoperability to our PDK search, we find only 200K matches, or less than 0.5% — and therein exposes the chronic problem w... » read more

Shootout At 28nm

By Ed Sperling - 15 May, 2014 - Comments: 0

By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus Samsung, Soitec and STMicroelectronics are joining forces on 28nm FD-SOI, creating a showdown with TSMC and others over the best single-patterned processes and materials and raising questions about how quickly companies need to move to the finFET technology generation. The multi-source manufacturing collaboration agreement for fully depleted silicon-on-insulato... » read more

The New Face Of MCUs

By Ann Mutschler - 10 Apr, 2014 - Comments: 0

For years, the humble microcontroller was known as the workhorse of white goods and other embedded applications that required some amount of processing, but not as much as a microprocessor would provide. Much has changed since then. Today’s MCUs are the star components in fast-growing and increasingly sophisticated application areas such as automotive, smartphones and the Internet of Thing... » read more

Directed Self-Assembly Gains Momentum

By Mark LaPedus - 20 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

At last year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography symposium, directed self-assembly (DSA) grabbed the spotlight as chipmakers provided the first glimpse of their initial work and results with the technology. The results were stunning, thereby propelling DSA from a curiosity item to a possible patterning solution for next-generation devices. Last year, in fact, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Intel and Sams... » read more

The Week In Review: Design

By Ed Sperling - 14 Mar, 2014 - Comments: 0

Tools Synopsys uncorked the next version of its verification tool, which includes static and formal verification, new debug capabilities, and low-power and X-propagation simulation. The company says the new tool offers up to 5X performance improvement. Cadence rolled out a new version of its verification solution for designs using ARM’s interconnect IP, speeding up verification and analys... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 25

By Mark LaPedus - 25 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 0

Intel joins DSA consortium Arkema, ASML, Intel and others have formed a new consortium in the emerging directed self-assembly (DSA) arena.The group, dubbed PLACYD, is a European funded consortium. Part of the Seventh Framework European Programme (FP7) and funded by ENIAC JU (European Technology Platform for Nanoelectronics), the project includes Arkema, CEA-Leti, STMicroelectronics, Intel,... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 11

By Mark LaPedus - 11 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 1

Monolithic 3D SRAM project A group of companies have started a research project to propel the development of monolithic 3D chip technology. The research project, called COMPOSE³, involves the ability to stack transistors vertically. Within three years, the group hopes to unveil a proof of concept for building the world’s first 14nm, 3D-stacked SRAM cell based on III-V materials. Co... » read more

ATE Platform Strategy Gains Ground

By Kenji Tsuda - 10 Feb, 2014 - Comments: 0

More than a decade ago, at the urging of Intel, the ATE industry set out to reduce the cost of test in the digital chip market. Backed by companies such as Intel, Motorola, Renesas, Advantest and others, they formed an ATE consortium to make this all work. The aim of the consortium was to devise an "open architecture" for ATE. This would enable the development of third-party plug-and-play m... » read more

A Perspective On Open Process Specification

By Ted Paone - 27 Jan, 2014 - Comments: 2

It is the job of the Process Design Kit (PDK) engineers to deliver a high-quality PDK that properly represents the process requirements and constraints and supports the design flows used by their customers. The PDK engineer takes multiple inputs describing the process and the devices and circuitry in the process and generates the output in the form of OpenAccess technology libraries (techDB), d... » read more

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