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
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
TSMC puts up solid QTR, Capex increase for 5NM and capacity increase, 5G/mobile remains driver- HPC good 7NM, 27% of revs- Very nice margins!
In line quarter-Good guide
TSMC reported revenues of $9.4B and EPS of $0.62 , more or less in line with expectations, perhaps a touch below ” whisper” expectations which had been… Read More
In early May of this year, eSilicon announced the tape-out of a test chip which included the latest additions to its neuASIC™ IP platform. At the upcoming Hot Chips Symposium to be held at Stanford on August 19 and 20, 2019, eSilicon will be demonstrating the software component of this AI-enabling IP platform. At the event, eSilicon… Read More
At the ES Design West event in San Francisco last week Silvaco’s CTO and EVP of Products, Babak Taheri, gave a presentation titled, “Next Generation SoC Design: From Atoms to Systems”. The time slot for the talk was only 30-minutes which is simply not enough to discuss all the technology Silvaco is providing now. I had not looked closely… Read More
Since the beginning of May eSilicon has announced the tape-out of three TSMC 7nm test chips. The first of these, a 7nm 400G Ethernet Gearbox/Retimer design, caught my eye and I followed up with Hugh Durdan, their vice president of strategy and products, to learn more about it. Rather than just respin their 56G SerDes, they decided… Read More
Why does it seem like current FPGA devices work very much like the original telephone systems with exchanges where workers connected calls using cords and plugs? Achronix thinks it is now time to jettison Switch Blocks and adopt a new approach. Their motivation is to improve the suitability of FPGAs to machine learning applications,… 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
