The SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference is the semiconductor industries premier conference on lithography. The 2023 conference was held the week of February 27th and at the conference Applied Materials announced their Sculpta® pattern shaping tool. Last week I had an opportunity to interview Steven Sherman the Managing … Read More
Author: Scotten Jones
SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference 2023 – AMAT Sculpta® Announcement
IEDM 2023 – 2D Materials – Intel and TSMC
Intel and TSMC make up two of the three leading edge logic companies. At IEDM held in December 2022, Intel presented a paper on 2D Materials and TSMC presented 6 papers. Clearly 2D materials are of great interest at least to two of the three leading edge logic companies. Before diving into the papers, some background context is needed.… Read More
IEDM 2022 – Imec 4 Track Cell
At the IEDM conference in December 2022, Imec presented “Semi-damascene Integration of a 2-layer MOL VHV Scaling Booster to Enable 4-track Standard Cells,” I had a chance to not only read the paper and see it presented, but also to interview one of the authors Zsolt Tokie.
Logic designs are built up by standard cells such as inverters,… Read More
IEDM 2022 – TSMC 3nm
TSMC presented two papers on 3nm at the 2022 IEDM; “Critical Process features Enabling Aggressive Contacted Gate Pitch Scaling for 3nm CMOS Technology and Beyond” and “A 3nm CMOS FinFlexTM Platform Technology with Enhanced Power Efficiency and Performance for Mobile SOC and High Performance Computing Applications”.
When … Read More
IEDM 2022 – Ann Kelleher of Intel – Plenary Talk
Ann Kelleher is Intel’s Executive Vice President, General Manager, Technology Development, and she gave the first plenary talk to kick off the 2022 IEDM, “Celebrating 75 Years of the Transistor A Look at the Evolution of Moore’s Law Innovation”. I am generally not a fan of plenary talks because I think they are often too broad and… Read More
Does SMIC have 7nm and if so, what does it mean
Recently TechInsights analyzed a Bitcoin Miner chip fabbed at SMIC and declared SMIC has a 7nm process. There has been some debate as to whether the SMIC process is really 7nm and what it means if it is 7nm. I wanted to discuss the case for and against the process being 7nm, and what I think it means.
First off, I want to say I am not going … Read More
SEMICON West 2022 and the Imec Roadmap
SEMICON West 2022 was held from July 12th to 14th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
On Monday the 11th before the show, Imec held a technology forum at the Marriott Marquee right around the corner from the Moscone center. In recent years the Imec forums have shifted away from the process technology I cover to more of a system and… Read More
IEDM 2022 is shaping up
IEDM is one of the premiere conferences for the latest information on leading edge semiconductor technology. The 68th annual International Electron Devices Meeting will be held December 3rd through 7th at the San Francisco Hilton.
The paper submission deadline is July 14, 2022, and the late-news deadline is August 22, 2022. … Read More
Imec Buried Power Rail and Backside Power Delivery at VLSI
At the VLSI Technology Symposium Imec presented on Buried Power Rails (BPR) and Backside Power Delivery (BSPD) in a paper entitled: “Scaled FinFETs Connected by Using Both Wafer Sides for Routing via Buried Power Rails”. I recently had a chance to interview one of the authors, Naoto Horiguchi about the work. I have interviewed … Read More
ASML EUV Update at SPIE
At the 2022 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, ASML presented an update on EUV. I recently had a chance to go over the presentations with Mike Lercel of ASML. The following is a summary of our discussions.
0.33 NA
The 0.33 NA EUV systems are the production workhorse systems for leading edge lithography today. 0.33 NA systems are… Read More
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