SEMICON West – Leti FDSOI and IOT, status and roadmap

SEMICON West – Leti FDSOI and IOT, status and roadmap
by Scotten Jones on 07-28-2016 at 7:00 am

On Tuesday, July 12th at SEMICON West I had an opportunity to sit down with Marie Semeria, the CEO of Leti and discuss the status and future of FDSOI. Leti pioneered FDSOI 15 years ago and has been the leading FDSOI research ever since.

Two years ago Leti and ST Micro demonstrated products on 28nm that are cost competitive with bulk technology.… Read More


IMEC Technology Forum at SEMICON – Coventor could save you billions!

IMEC Technology Forum at SEMICON – Coventor could save you billions!
by Scotten Jones on 07-22-2016 at 7:00 am

The development of leading edge semiconductor technology is incredibly expensive, with estimates ranging from a few to several billion dollars for new nodes. The time to develop a leading edge process is also a critical competitive issue with some of the largest opportunities awarded based on who is first to yield on a new node.… Read More


IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – Moving the Electronics Industry Forward

IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – Moving the Electronics Industry Forward
by Scotten Jones on 06-02-2016 at 4:00 pm

IMEC is a technology research center located in Belgium that is one of the premier semiconductor research centers in the world today. The IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) is a two-day event attended by approximately 1,000 people to showcase the work done by IMEC and their partners.

Gary Patton is the Chief Technical Officer and Senior… Read More


TSMC and Solido on Variation-Aware Design of Memory and Standard Cell at Advanced Process Nodes

TSMC and Solido on Variation-Aware Design of Memory and Standard Cell at Advanced Process Nodes
by Daniel Nenni on 05-10-2016 at 12:00 pm

Being that TSMC and Solido are founding members of SemiWiki, you should be able find out everything you ever wanted to know on their respective landing pages. If not, just ask a question in the SemiWiki forum and I can assure you it will be answered in great detail. And here are some other interesting 2015 factoids from Solido:… Read More


EUV is coming but will we need it?

EUV is coming but will we need it?
by Scotten Jones on 04-12-2016 at 4:00 pm

I have written multiple articles about this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference describing all of the progress EUV has made in the last year. Source power is improving, photoresists are getting faster, prototype pellicles are in testing, multiple sites around the world are exposing wafers by the thousands and more. Read More


10nm SRAM Projections – Who will lead

10nm SRAM Projections – Who will lead
by Scotten Jones on 03-25-2016 at 12:00 pm

At ISSCC this year Samsung published a paper entitled “A 10nm FinFET 128Mb SRAM with Assist Adjustment System for Power, Performance, and Area Optimization. In the paper Samsung disclosed a high density 6T SRAM cell size of 0.040µm[SUP]2[/SUP]. I thought it would be interesting to take a look at how this cell size stacks … Read More


Intel EUV Photoresist Progress and ASML High NA EUV

Intel EUV Photoresist Progress and ASML High NA EUV
by Scotten Jones on 03-10-2016 at 4:00 pm

SPIE Days 3 and 4:

Anna Lio of Intel presented EUV resists: What’s next?

Intel wants to insert EUV at 7nm but it has to be ready and economical. Critical Dimension Uniformity (CDU), Line Width Roughness (LWR) and edge placement/stochastics are all stable on 22nm, 14nm and 10nm pilot lines.… Read More


How 16nm and 14nm FinFETs Require New SPICE Simulators

How 16nm and 14nm FinFETs Require New SPICE Simulators
by Daniel Payne on 02-07-2016 at 7:00 am

About 35 years ago the first commercial SPICE circuit simulators emerged and they were quickly put to work helping circuit designers predict the timing and power of 6um NMOS designs. Then we had to limit our circuit simulations to just hundreds of transistors and interconnect elements to fit into the RAM and complete simulation… Read More


FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016

FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
by Tom Simon on 01-13-2016 at 12:00 pm

It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More


Challenges in IP Qualification with Rising Physical Data

Challenges in IP Qualification with Rising Physical Data
by Pawan Fangaria on 12-17-2015 at 7:00 am

With every new technology node, there are newer physical effects that need to be taken into account. And every new physical effect brings with itself several new formats to model them. Often a format is also associated with several of its derivatives, sometimes an standard reincarnation of a proprietary format further evolved… Read More