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The Need for Low Pupil Fill in EUV Lithography

The Need for Low Pupil Fill in EUV Lithography
by Fred Chen on 03-15-2020 at 10:00 am

The Need for Low Pupil Fill in EUV Lithography 1

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography targets sub-20 nm resolution using a wavelength range of ~13.3-13.7 nm (with some light including DUV outside this band as well) and a reflective ring-field optics system. ASML has been refining the EUV tool platform, starting with the NXE:3300B, the very first platform with a numerical

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There is No Easy Fix to AI Privacy Problems

There is No Easy Fix to AI Privacy Problems
by Matthew Rosenquist on 03-14-2020 at 8:00 am

There is No Easy Fix to AI Privacy Problems

Artificial intelligence – more specifically, the machine learning (ML) subset of AI – has a number of privacy problems.

Not only does ML require vast amounts of data for the training process, but the derived system is also provided with access to even greater volumes of data as part of the inference processing while in operation. … Read More


SPIE 2020 – Applied Materials Material-Enabled Patterning

SPIE 2020 – Applied Materials Material-Enabled Patterning
by Scotten Jones on 03-13-2020 at 10:00 am

2020 SPIE Media Briefing Full Slides for Scott Jones Page 16

I wasn’t able to attend the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference this year for personal reasons, but Applied Materials was kind enough to set up a phone briefing for me with Regina Freed to discuss their Materials-Enabled Patterning announcement.

At IEDM Applied Materials (AMAT) tried to put together a panel across the entire… Read More


Why IP Designers Don’t Like Surprises!

Why IP Designers Don’t Like Surprises!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-13-2020 at 6:00 am

IPDelta SemiWiki

If it’s your job to get a SoC design through synthesis, timing/power closure and final verification, the last thing you need are surprises in new versions of the IP blocks that are integrated into the design. If your IP supplier sends a new version, the best possible scenario is that this is only a small incremental change from… Read More


The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 4: Short latency is king

The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 4: Short latency is king
by Frederic Nabki & Dominic Deslandes on 03-12-2020 at 10:00 am

The Story of Ultra WideBand Part 4

How Ultra-wideband aligns with 5G’s premise

In part 3, we discussed the time-frequency duality or how time and bandwidth are interchangeable. If one wants to compress in time a wireless transmission, more frequency bandwidth is needed. This property can be used to increase the accuracy of ranging, as we saw in part 3. Another very… Read More


Turbo-Charge Your Next PCIe SoC with PLDA Switch IP

Turbo-Charge Your Next PCIe SoC with PLDA Switch IP
by Mike Gianfagna on 03-12-2020 at 6:00 am

Integrated NVMe interfaces

SemiWiki has a new IP partner, PLDA and they bring a lot to the party.  Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) is a popular high-performance data interface standard. Think GPUs, RAID cards, WiFi cards or solid-state disk (SSD) drives connected to a motherboard. The protocol offers much higher throughput than previous… Read More


Where have all the Leaders gone – a profile of T.J. Rodgers

Where have all the Leaders gone – a profile of T.J. Rodgers
by Erach Desai on 03-11-2020 at 10:00 am

T.J. Rodgers SemiWiki

Silicon Valley has morphed from the days of semiconductor fabs interspersed between strawberry farms, and 3:00 pm rush-hour traffic during the shift change for the fabrication facility engineers and technicians. The leadership of technology companies has also arguably devolved from people who inspired employees and stewarded… Read More


An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight

An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight
by Bernard Murphy on 03-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Metrics

Security has been a domain blessed with an abundance of methods to improve in various ways, not so much in methods to measure the effectiveness of those improvements. With the best will in the world, absent an agreed security measurement, all those improvement techniques still add up to “trust me, our baby monitor camera is really… Read More


The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 3: The Resurgence

The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 3: The Resurgence
by Frederic Nabki & Dominic Deslandes on 03-10-2020 at 10:00 am

The Story of Ultra WideBand SemiWiki

In Part 2, we discussed the second false-start of Ultra-WideBand (UWB) leveraging over-engineered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transceivers, launching at the dawn of the great recession and surpassed by a new generation of Wi-Fi transceivers. These circumstances signed the end of the proposed applications… Read More


Viewing the Largest IC Layout Files Quickly

Viewing the Largest IC Layout Files Quickly
by Daniel Payne on 03-10-2020 at 6:00 am

Skipper, Empyrean

The old adage, “Time is money”, certainly rings true today for IC designers, so the entire EDA industry has focused on this challenging goal of making tools that help speed up design and physical verification tasks like DRC (Design Rule Checks) and LVS (Layout Versus Schematic). Sure, the big three EDA vendors have… Read More