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
A Research Update on Carbon Nanotube Fabrication
It is quite amazing that silicon-based devices have been the foundation of our industry for over 60 years, as it was clear that the initial germanium-based devices would be difficult to integrate at a larger scale. (GaAs devices have also developed a unique microelectronics market segment.) More recently, it is also rather … Read More
Webinar: Increase Layout Team Productivity with SkillCAD
The Cadence Virtuoso Design System has been one of the premier Integrated Circuit design systems for many years and is used by most major semiconductor companies. While it is powerful and versatile, it is often not optimized for certain complex, repetitive and time-consuming layout design tasks.
The founder and president … Read More
Silicon Catalyst’s Semi Industry Forum – All-Star Cast Didn’t Disappoint
A few weeks ago I wrote about an upcoming event Silicon Catalyst was hosting, the Semiconductor Industry Forum – A View to the Future. I mentioned a high-profile group of presenters: Don Clark, Contributing Journalist, New York Times as moderator; Mark Edelstone, Chairman of Global Semiconductor Investment Banking, Morgan… Read More
Advanced Process Development is Much More than just Litho
The vast majority of the attention given to the introduction of each new advanced process node focuses on lithographic updates. The common metrics quoted are the transistors per mm**2 or the (high-density) SRAM bit cell area. Alternatively, detailed decomposition analysis may be applied using transmission electron microscopy… Read More


TSMC Formally Sues Ex-SVP Over Alleged Transfer of Trade Secrets to Intel