Apple drives the semi industry harder than Wintel ever did: Is winning Apple’s chip business a pyrrhic victory? Is 14nm done before it starts? Too short to be profitable?
Chips marching to an Apple cadence…
In the “old days” when Wintel ruled the roost and drove the semi industry, it was driving spending… Read More
Tag: asml
Mapping Focus and Dose onto BEOL Fabrication Effects
With today’s ArF based lithography using 193nm wavelength light, we are hard up against the limitations imposed by the Raleigh equation. Numerous clever things have been devised to maximize yield and reduce feature size. These include 2 beam lithography, multiple patterning, immersion litho processes to improve NA, thinner… Read More
ASML ASyMptotic progress- When will we get to EUV?
- ASML making progress – but is it fast enough?
- ASML has missed 10nm , can it catch 7nm? An economic question
- Day one at SPIE- Better tone than last year but still cautious
1000 simulated wafers versus 700 simulated
At the opening of the SPIE conference ASML announced that TSMC had reached 1000 wafers a day “exposed”… Read More
7nm node is arriving, which ones will continue past 2020?
‘Laughing Buddha’ is eternal, but for semiconductor industry, I must say it’s ‘laughing Moore’. Moore made a predictive hypothesis and the whole world is inclined to let that continue, eternally? When we were at 28nm, we weren’t hoping to go beyond 20/22nm; voices like ‘Moore’s law is dead’ started emerging. Today, we are already… Read More
TSMC Bringing EUV Into Production
Last week was ASML’s investor day. I wasn’t there and they haven’t yet got the material posted on their website, so this is all second hand information. As you know, if you have read any of my comments on EUV, I have been dubious about whether EUV would ever work for production.
The three big problems seem to be:
- source
EUV Will Never Happen
I had lunch today with a guy who has to remain nameless. But he is on the edge of the semiconductor lithography thing. He told me EUV will never happen. Of course lots of people have said that. Me for one. But he said everyone knows it. The investment community, the foundries, everyone. Intel put money into ASML in the hopes that it would… Read More
Damn! Cramer Figured It Out
As an investor, one has to always be aware when Jim Cramer informs the world of the investment scenario you have been playing comes out of the shadows and sees the light of day. Soon the herd will follow which is positive, but now one has to figure how long to ride the roller coaster. In an article posted on thestreet.com entitled “Tech… Read More
Traditional Model of Funding Semiconductor Equipment is Broken?
At Semicon a few weeks ago the big news was that Intel was making a big investment in ASML as a way of funding two development programs: extreme ultra-violet (EUV) and 450mm wafers. This week TSMC announced that they would join the program too, committing 275M Euros over a five year period. They are also taking a 5% stake in ASML. ASML… Read More
Intel Opens a New Front with ASML
Behind great humor often lies irony. In the midst of a struggle by the European Union to extract $1.3B from Intel in an ages old Anti-Trust case, the latter makes a strategic move to embolden the Dutch firm ASML to accelerate the development of 450mm and EUV and thus save a continental jewel. What now say EU? When disfunction and bankruptcy… Read More