Work from home (WFH) has become a normal occurrence this past year. “Do you work from home?” “Of course, where else?” Samtec is taking the whole work from home thing up a notch with a new webinar lineup for 2021. Back by popular demand, they are launching a new series of educational webinars. Started last year, the gEEk SpEEk Webinar… Read More
CES 2021 Goes All Digital
CES, the massive consumer technology show put on by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), was held this week. Due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, CES 2021 was all digital. Last year, CES 2020 had over 170,000 attendees from over 160 countries and 4,400 exhibiting companies.
CES 2020 was held January 7-10, 2020 in Las Vegas,… Read More
CES 2021 and all things Cycling Technology
It’s January so time to give you another summary of what I’ve found at CES 2021 about new cycling products that have electronic content. During the pandemic in 2020 we’ve seen a surge in sales for bicycles, e-bikes, spin bikes and trainers as people wanted a simple way of getting around town running errands, or… Read More
ISS 2021 – Scotten W. Jones – Logic Leadership in the PPAC era
I was asked to give a talk at the 2021 ISS conference and the following is a write up of the talk.
The title of the talk is “Logic Leadership in the PPAC era”.
The talk is broken up into three main sections:
- Background information explaining PPAC and Standard Cells.
- A node-by-node comparisons of companies running leading edge logic
The Latest in Dielectrics for Advanced Process Nodes
Of the three types of materials used in microelectronics – i.e., semiconductors, metals, and dielectrics – the first two often get the most attention. Yet, there is a pressing need for a rich variety of dielectric materials in device fabrication and interconnect isolation to satisfy the performance, power, and reliability … Read More
Webinar: Rescale is Providing an On-Ramp to the Hybrid Cloud for Chip Design
We all know that design complexity is increasing at a fast pace. There’s always more analysis to run on larger and larger volumes of data. During tapeout, these demands can grow by an order of magnitude. Successful design projects need to add huge amounts of CPU, memory and storage for short bursts of time during tapeout to meet their… Read More
IEDM 2020 – Imec Plenary talk
On Monday morning at IEDM, Sri Samavedam of Imec opened the technical program with a plenary talk entitled “Future Logic Scaling: Towards Atomic Channels and Deconstructed Chips”. I am not generally a fan of plenary talks, I think the presenters often try to cover too much in their talks and end up not providing enough detail to be… Read More
Optimization for pFET Nanosheet Devices
The next transition from current FinFET devices at advanced process nodes is the “nanosheet” device, as depicted in the figure below. [1]
The FinFET provides improved gate-to-channel electrostatic control compared to a planar device, where the gate traverses three sides of the fin. The “gate-all-around” characteristics… Read More
What Might the “1nm Node” Look Like?
The device roadmap for the next few advanced process nodes seems relatively clear. The FinFET topology will subsequently be displaced by a “gate-all-around” device, typically using multiple stacked channels with a metal gate completely surrounding the “nanosheets”. Whereas the fin demonstrates improved gate-to-channel… Read More
Analog Bits is Taking the Virtual Holiday Party up a Notch or Two
As 2020 comes to a close, I hear a lot of chatter about virtual meeting fatigue; “I’m Zoomed out”. We’ve all attended virtual versions of conferences this year with various degrees of success. Overall, I have to say these events are getting better. Semiconductor and EDA folks have a way of adapting and inventing, and it’s showing … Read More
MediaTek Develops Chip Utilizing TSMC’s 2nm Process, Achieving Milestones in Performance and Power Efficiency