As I have discussed before, I believe that IEDM is the premier technical conference for understanding leading edge process technologies. Beginning this coming weekend, this year’s edition of IEDM will be held virtually, and I highly recommend attending.
The conference held a press briefing last Monday. The tutorial and short… Read More
Seeking Alpha just published an article about Intel and Samsung passing TSMC for process leadership. The Intel part seems to be a theme with them, they have talked in the past about how Intel does bigger density improvements with each generation than the foundries but forget that the foundries are doing 5 nodes in the time it takes… Read More
The 2020 VLSI Technology Symposium was held as a virtual conference from June 14th through June 19th. At the symposium Imec gave an interesting paper on Monolithic CFET and I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Hiroaki Arimura.
It is well known in the industry that FinFETs (FF) are reaching the end of their scaling life. Samsung… Read More
TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform’s main objective is to create and promote partnership for producing chips. This year’s OIP event included a presentation on the joint efforts of Silicon Creations, Mentor, a Siemens business and TSMC to produce essential PLL IP for 5nm and 3nm designs. The relentless push for smaller geometries… Read More
The 2020 VLSI Technology Symposium was held as a virtual conference from June 14th through June 19th. At the symposium Imec gave an interesting paper on Buried Power Rails (BPR) and I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Anshul Gupta.
As logic devices continue to scale down metal pitch is reaching a limit. Imec defines a pitch… Read More
On May 15th TSMC “announced its intention to build and operate an advanced semiconductor fab in the United States with the mutual understanding and commitment to support from the U.S. federal government and the State of Arizona.”
The fab will run TSMC’s 5nm technology and have a capacity of 20,000 wafers per month (wpm). Construction… Read More
Recently Seeking Alpha published an article “Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Losing Its Process Leadership To Intel” and Dan Nenni (SemiWiki founder) asked me to take a look at the article and do my own analysis. This is a subject I have followed and published on for many years.
Before I dig into specific process density… Read More
I couldn’t attend the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference this year for personal reasons, but last week Mike Lercel of ASML was nice enough to walk me through the major ASML presentations from the conference.
Introduction
In late 2018, Samsung and TSMC introduced 7nm foundry logic processes with 5 to 7 EUV layers, throughout … Read More
Imec is one of the premier semiconductor research organizations and at IEDM they presented dozens of papers. I had the opportunity to see several of the papers presented and interview 3 of Imec’s researchers.
Jan Van Houdt, DMTS ferroelectric and exploratory memory
I have had very interesting discussions with Imec researchers… Read More
On Tuesday night of IEDM, Applied Materials held a panel discussion “The Future of Logic: EUV is Here, Now What?”. The panelists were: Regina Freed, managing director at Applied Materials as the moderator, Geoffrey Yeap, senior director of advanced technology at TSMC, Bala Haran, director of silicon process research at IBM, … Read More
