The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers IC Insights released its foundry rankings in terms of sales in 2015. TSMC was the leader with $26.4 billion in sales last year. Second ranked GlobalFoundries, which took over IBM’s IC business in 2015, made some gains. With IBM’s chip unit, GlobalFoundries’ quarterly sales in 4Q ‘15 were about $1.4 billion, an annual run-rate of $5.6 billion, about 12% greater than the compa... » read more

10nm Versus 7nm


The silicon foundry business is heating up, as vendors continue to ramp their 16nm/14nm finFET processes. At the same time, they are racing each other to ship the next technologies on the roadmap—10nm and 7nm. But the landscape is complicated, with each vendor taking a different strategy. [getentity id="22865" e_name="Samsung"], for one, plans to ship its 10nm [getkc id="185" kc_name="fi... » read more

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

Foundries Expand Their Scope


By Ed Sperling & Mark LaPedus Major foundries are stepping up their offerings across a wide swath of technology nodes, specialty processes and advanced packaging—a recognition that end markets are fragmenting and that the path forward includes a mix of new and established processes. As the smart phone market flattens, there is no single "next big thing" to drive volume at the most ... » read more

Inside Process Technology


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the foundry business, memory, process technology, lithography and other topics with David Fried, chief technology officer at [getentity id="22210" e_name="Coventor"], a supplier of predictive modeling tools. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: Chipmakers are ramping up 16nm/14nm finFETs today, with 10nm and 7nm finFETs just around... » 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

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

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system from IBM. A single TrueNorth processor from IBM consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons. The chip is fabricated based on a 28nm LPP pro... » read more

The Week In Review: Design/IoT


Tools Synopsys unveiled a new custom design solution targeting FinFET layout, introducing visually-assisted routing automation, a built-in design rule checking engine, templates to apply previous layout decisions to new designs, and IC Compiler integration. TSMC certified the new tool for 10nm and 7nm FinFET process technologies. It has also been adopted by STMicroelectronics, GSI Technology... » read more

Where Is Next-Gen Lithography?


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss lithography and photomask technologies with Greg McIntyre, director of the Advanced Patterning Department at [getentity id="22217" comment="Imec"]; Harry Levinson, senior fellow and senior director of technology research at [getentity id="22819" comment="GlobalFoundries"]; Uday Mitra, vice president and head of strategy and marketing for the Etch Bu... » read more

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