Manufacturing Bits: June 12


Elastic diamonds A group has developed a way to make elastic diamonds, enabling tiny diamond needles that can flex and stretch. Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the City University of Hong Kong and Nanyang Technological University have developed a process that enables elastic diamonds. Elastic diamonds could one day... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 9


Two-photon lithography Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has extended the capabilities of a high-resolution 3D printing technique called two-photon lithography (TPL). TPL enables the development of 3D-printed objects. LLNL’s technology could enable 3D-printed embedded structures inside the body, such as stents, joint replacements or bone scaffolds. It could also one day be ... » read more

Exploring New Scaling Approaches


At the recent SPIE Photomask Technology + Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography 2017 conference, Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss semiconductor technology with Tsu-Jae King Liu, the TSMC Distinguished Professor in Microelectronics in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. More specifically, Liu discussed some of the new... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Sept. 19


Ion implant lithography At a recent conference, the University of California at Berkeley presented more details about its efforts to develop a multiple patterning method using tilted ion implantation (TII) technology. TII is somewhat similar today’s self-aligned double patterning (SADP) processes in logic and memory. SADP and the follow-on technology, self-aligned quadruple (SAQP), enable... » read more

System Bits: March 11


Colored diamonds: a superconductor’s best friend Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and UCLA have figured out that colored diamonds can measure the tiny magnetic fields in high-temperature superconductors, providing a new tool to probe these much ballyhooed but poorly understood materials. Diamond sensors will give us m... » read more

Design For Variability


By Ed Sperling Faced with shrinking margins, manufacturing process fluctuations that could mean one more or one less atom in a transistor and proximity issues in layout the most advanced chipmakers have begun designing for variability. Rather than working with fixed numbers, such as voltage, power and area, the goal of DFV is basically averaging all of these numbers. While this includes som... » read more

Tech Talk: Saving Power By The Milliwatt


Jan Rabaey, head of UC Berkeley's Wireless Research Center and the author of a new book entitled, "Low Power Design Essentials," discusses how to generate small amounts of power and what can be done to reduce the amount of power needed for semiconductor design. [youtube vid=G0j1Sm8RCns] » read more

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