At Semicon West last week I attended presentations by Soitec and CEA Leti, and had breakfast with CEA Leti CEO Marie Semeria, key members of the Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) ecosystem. I have also seen some comments in the SemiWiki forum lately that make me believe there is some confusion on the roles of different companies… Read More
Standard Node Trend
I have previously published analysis’ converting leading edge logic processes to “standard nodes” and comparing standard nodes by company and time. Recently updated details on the 7nm process node have become available and in this article, I will revisit the standard node calculations and trends.… Read More
Exclusive – GLOBALFOUNDRIES discloses 7nm process detail
In a SemiWiki EXCLUSIVE – GLOBALFOUNDRIES has now disclosed the key metrics for their 7nm process. As I previously discussed in my 14nm, 16nm, 10nm and 7nm – What we know now blog GLOBALFOUNDRIES licensed their 14nm process from Samsung and decided to skip 10nm because they thought it would be a short-lived node. At … Read More
GlobalFoundries 7nm and EUV Update!
Scott Jones and I had the opportunity to talk again with Gary Patton, GlobalFoundries CTO and SVP of R&D for a quick update on 7nm and EUV. Gary has been at GF for two years now with more than 500 other technologists from the IBM semiconductor acquisition. 7nm is the first IBM based process from GF (14nm was licensed from Samsung),… Read More
$100M China Investment for FD-SOI Ecosystem!
When GlobalFoundries first briefed me on 22FDX during a trip to Dresden in 2015, China was one of the first things that came to mind. The China semiconductor market was still on 28nm and FinFETs seemed far away for the majority of the Chinese fabless companies. A low cost, low power, low complexity 22nm process with a path to 12nm (12FDX)… Read More
14nm 16nm 10nm and 7nm – What we know now
Last week Intel held a manufacturing day where they revealed a lot of information about their 10nm process for the first time and information on competitor processes continues to slowly come out as well. I thought it would be useful to summarize what we know now, especially since some of what Intel announced was different than what… Read More
Shootout at 22nm!
For an industry that drives improvement at an exponential rate it is funny how often something old is new again. Intel went into high volume production on 22nm in 2011, and TSMC and Samsung have both had 20nm technologies in production for several years. And yet, recently we have seen renewed interest in 22nm. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has… Read More
Intel Manufacturing Day: Nodes must die, but Moore’s Law lives!
Yesterday I attended Intel’s manufacturing day. This was the first manufacturing day Intel has held in three years and according to Intel their most in depth ever.
Nodes must die
I have written several articles comparing process technologies across the leading-edge logic producers – GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel, Samsung… Read More
EUV is NOT Ready for 7nm!
The annual SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference kicked off last night with vendor sponsored networking events and such. SPIE is the international society for optics and photonics but this year SPIE Advanced Lithography is all about the highly anticipated EUV technology. Scotten Jones and I are at SPIE so expect more detailed… Read More
Could China Take the Lead in Installed 300mm Capacity?
China buys more than half of the semiconductors manufactured in the world and yet only produces less the 10% of their own demand. Recently there have been a lot of announcements out of China about large scale investments in semiconductor manufacturing. The Chinese government for example has announced plans to invest $161 billion… Read More
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