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
Each year on the Sunday before the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, Nikon holds their LithoVision event. This year I had the privilege of being invited to speak for the third consecutive year, unfortunately, the event had to be canceled due to concerns over the COVID-19 virus but by the time the event was canceled I had already… 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
IBM and Leti each presented several papers at IEDM including a joint nanosheet paper. I had the opportunity to sit down with Huiming Bu, director of advanced logic & memory tech and Veeraraghavan Basker, senior engineer from IBM and then in a separate interview Francois Andrieu, head of advanced CMOS laboratory and Shay Reboh,… 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
IEDM is in my opinion the premiere conference for information on state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. In “My Top Three Reasons to Attend IEDM 2019” article I singled out the TSMC 5nm paper as a key reason to attend.
IEDM is one of the best organized conferences I attend and as soon as you pick up your badge you are handed a memory… Read More
Is there more downside than upside in stocks?
Entering a seasonally weak period, then what?
Does China trade come back to haunt industry?
Cycle is past the bottom-But what kind of up cycle?
The most recent up cycle in the industry was a huge one, driven by a huge spend on NAND as SSD’s sucked up infinite number of devices. DRAM … Read More
The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting is in my opinion the leading technology conference to understand the current state-of-the-art in semiconductor process technology. Held each year in early December in San Francisco it is a must attend conference for anyone following technology development. The following is… Read More
On Monday, July 8th Imec held a technology forum ahead of Semicon West. I saw the papers presented and interviewed three of the authors. The following is a summary of what I feel are the keys points of their research.
Arnaud Furnemont
Arnaud Furnemont’s talk was titled “From Technology Scaling to System Optimization”. Simple 2D … Read More
Samsung and TSMC have both made recent disclosures about their 5nm process and I though it would be a good time to look at what we know about them and compare the two processes.
A lot of what has been announced about 5nm is in comparison to 7nm so we will first review 7nm.
7nm
Figure 1 compares Samsung’s 7LPP process to TSMC’s 7FF and 7FFP… Read More
