Mini-Consortia Forming Around Chiplets


Mini-consortia for chiplets are sprouting up across the industry, driven by demands for increasing customization in tight market windows and fueled by combinations of hardened IP that have been proven in silicon. These loosely aligned partnerships are working to develop LEGO-like integration models for highly specific applications and end markets. But they all are starting small, because it'... » read more

Tech Forecast: Fab Processes To Watch Through 2040


The massive proliferation of semiconductors in more markets, and more applications within those markets, is expected to propel the industry to more than $1 trillion by 2030. But over the next 17 years, semiconductors will reach well beyond the numbers, changing the way people work, how they communicate, and how they measure and monitor their health and well-being. Chips will be the enabling ... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Global semiconductor sales decreased 5.2% month-to-month in January, according to a new report by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). For the year, worldwide chip sales are down 18.5%, with the largest drop in sales by China at 31.6%, followed by the Asia Pacific region at 19.5%, and the Americas at 12.4%. Despite the contraction, companies are increasing investments in manufacturi... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing & Test


The Biden Administration’s export bans for semiconductor manufacturing equipment are delaying expansion plans for Chinese chipmakers, Nikkei Asia reports. Yangtze Memory Technologies (YMTC) has halted work on its second memory plant near Wuhan, and ChangXin Memory Technologies (CMTX) says its second production facility, slated to open in 2023, will be delayed until 2024 or 2025. In an effo... » read more

Devices And Transistors For The Next 75 Years


The 75th anniversary of the invention of the transistor sparked a lively panel discussion at IEDM, spurring debate about the future of CMOS, the role of III-V and 2D materials in future transistors, and what will be the next great memory architecture.[1] Industry veterans from the memory, logic, and research communities see high-NA EUV production, NAND flash with 1,000 layers, and hybrid bon... » read more

2D Semiconductor Materials Creep Toward Manufacturing


As transistors scale down, they need thinner channels to achieve adequate channel control. In silicon, though, surface roughness scattering degrades mobility, limiting the ultimate channel thickness to about 3nm. Two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), such as MoS2 and WSe2, are attractive in part because they avoid this limitation. With no out-of-plane dangling bonds and at... » read more

As Chiplets Go Mainstream, Chip Industry Players Collaborate to Overcome New Development Challenges


The semiconductor industry is building a comprehensive chiplet ecosystem to seize on the advantages of the devices over traditional monolithic system-on-chips (SoCs) such as improved performance, lower power consumption, and greater design flexibility. With heterogeneous integration (HI) presenting significant challenges, collaboration to fulfill the potential of chiplets has become even more i... » read more

Week In Review: Semiconductor Manufacturing, Test


Chips for consumer devices are down, but the overall chip industry is actively preparing for the next phase of growth. Worldwide silicon wafer shipments, which are an aggregate view of all the various semiconductor segments, hit an all-time high in 2022, increasing 4% to 14,713 million square inches (MSI). Wafer revenue, meanwhile, rose 9.5% to $13.8 billion over the same period, SEMI reported ... » read more

Chip Industry’s Earnings Roundup


Editor's Note: Updated throughout February 2023 for additional earnings releases. Many companies reported revenue growth in the most recent quarter, but the latest round of chip industry earnings releases reflected some major themes: Demand for consumer electronics softened due to inflation, rising interest rates, and post-pandemic market saturation, creating a slump in the memory chip ... » read more

IEDM: TSMC N3 Details


I attended IEDM in San Francisco in December. There were two presentations about TSMC's N3 process. This is actually a bit of a misnomer since TSMC has two N3 processes, one simply called N3. The other (the second generation) is called N3E. The two papers were: Critical Process Features Enabling Aggressive Contacted Gate Pitch Scaling for 3nm CMOS Technology and Beyond A 3nm CMOS FinFl... » read more

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