What’s Changing In DRAM


Most of the attention in chip scaling has been focused on logic and on-chip memory, but off-chip memory is starting to encounter problems, as well. David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research, looks at the impact of shrinking features and increasing density, including variation, thermal effects and aging, as well as effects such as micro-loading and DRAM stacking. » read more

Adding Circuit Aging To Variability


Moving to a smaller node usually means another factor becomes important. The industry has become accustomed to doing process, temperature, voltage (PVT) corner analysis, but now it has to add aging into that mix. The problem is that planning for circuit aging is no longer a purely statistical process. Aging is dependent on activity over the lifetime of the device. Tools need to be modified a... » read more

MEMS: New Materials, Markets And Packaging


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk about future developments and challenges for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) with Gerold Schropfer, director of MEMS products and European operations in Lam Research's Computational Products group, and Michelle Bourke, senior director of strategic marketing for Lam's Customer Support Business Group. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.... » read more

Do We Have An IC Model Crisis?


Models are critical for IC design. Without them, it's impossible to perform analysis, which in turn limits optimizations. Those optimizations are especially important as semiconductors become more heterogenous, more customized, and as they are integrated into larger systems, creating a need for higher-accuracy models that require massive compute power to develop. But those factors, and other... » read more

Applications, Challenges For Using AI In Fabs


Experts at the Table: Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss chip scaling, transistors, new architectures, and packaging with Jerry Chen, head of global business development for manufacturing & industrials at Nvidia; David Fried, vice president of computational products at Lam Research; Mark Shirey, vice president of marketing and applications at KLA; and Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S. Wh... » read more

Variation Threat In Advanced Nodes, Packages Grows


Variation is becoming a much bigger and more complex problem for chipmakers as they push to the next process nodes or into increasingly dense advanced packages, raising concerns about the functionality and reliability of individual devices, and even entire systems. In the past, almost all concerns about variation focused on the manufacturing process. What printed on a piece of silicon didn't... » read more

Process Variation Analysis of Device Performance Using Virtual Fabrication


A new methodology is demonstrated to assess the impact of fabrication inherent process variability on 14-nm fin field effect transistor (FinFET) device performance. A model of a FinFET device was built using virtual device fabrication and testing. The model was subsequently calibrated on Design of Experiment corner case data that had been collected on a limited number of processed fab wafers. W... » read more

Brute-Force Analysis Not Keeping Up With IC Complexity


Much of the current design and verification flow was built on brute force analysis, a simple and direct approach. But that approach rarely scales, and as designs become larger and the number of interdependencies increases, ensuring the design always operates within spec is becoming a monumental task. Unless design teams want to keep adding increasing amounts of margin, they have to locate th... » read more

What’s Next In AI, Chips And Masks


Aki Fujimura, chief executive of D2S, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about AI and Moore’s Law, lithography, and photomask technologies. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: In the eBeam Initiative’s recent Luminary Survey, the participants had some interesting observations about the outlook for the photomask market. What were those observations? Fujimur... » read more

Increase In Analog Problems


Analog and mixed signal design has always been tough, but a resent survey suggests that the industry has seen significantly increased failures in the past year because the analog circuitry within an ASIC was out of tolerance. What is causing this spike in failures? Is it just a glitch in the data, or are these problems real? The answer is complicated, and to a large extent it depends heavily... » read more

← Older posts Newer posts →