IC to Systems Era

IC to Systems Era
by Daniel Nenni on 05-16-2019 at 12:00 pm

One of my favorite EDA disruptions is the Siemens acquisition of Mentor, pure genius. Joe Sawicki now runs the Mentor IC EDA business for Siemens so we will be seeing him at more conferences and events than ever before. Joe did a very nice keynote at the recent U2U conference that I would like to talk about before we head to the 56thDAC… Read More


EUV: the view from imec

EUV: the view from imec
by Paul McLellan on 06-23-2015 at 7:00 pm

I’m at the 2015 imec technology forum (ITF) in Brussels the next few days. One of the presentations today was by Peter Wennink, the CEO of ASML. The thing that most interested me in his presentation is what the status of EUV is today. ASML is the only company developing EUV steppers so what they think is important. On the other … Read More


10nm, the View from IBM

10nm, the View from IBM
by Paul McLellan on 10-05-2014 at 7:01 am

On the Cadence booth at DAC, Lars Liebmann of IBM presented on the challenges of 10nm. As he put it, how the lithography folks are keeping things very interesting for the EDA tool development engineers. Although 14nm/16nm hasn’t yet ramped into HVM, the advanced work for tools and IP has all moved to 10nm. Although Lars gave… Read More


Place & Route with FinFETs and Double Patterning

Place & Route with FinFETs and Double Patterning
by Paul McLellan on 09-29-2014 at 8:00 am

Place & route in the 16/14nm era requires a new approach since it is significantly more complex. Of course, every process generation is more complex than the one before and the designs are bigger. But modern processes have new problems. The two biggest changes are FinFETs and double patterning.

FinFETs, as I assume you know,… Read More


EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest

EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 am

All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More


Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring

Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
by Paul McLellan on 07-12-2014 at 11:00 am

To wrap up Semicon West, let’s go back to Monday and the imec presentations. In fact, An Steegen’s presentation titled The Semiconductor Roadmap. She covered a lot of ground, but some of her slides contain a wealth of information. Let’s look at the options for 10nm, 7nm and a little 5nm, what imec call N10, N7 and… Read More


FinFET & Multi-patterning Need Special P&R Handling

FinFET & Multi-patterning Need Special P&R Handling
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-28-2014 at 1:00 pm

I think by now a lot has been said about the necessity of multi-patterning at advanced technology nodes with extremely low feature size such as 20nm, because lithography using 193nm wavelength of light makes printing and manufacturing of semiconductor design very difficult. The multi-patterning is a novel semiconductor manufacturing… Read More


Triple Patterning

Triple Patterning
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2014 at 1:00 pm

As you can’t have failed to notice by now, 28nm is the last process node that does not require double patterning. At 20nm and below, at least some layers require double patterning. The tightest spacing is typically not the transistors but the local interconnect and, sometimes, metal 1.


In the litho world they call double patterning… Read More


Mastering the Magic of Multi-Patterning

Mastering the Magic of Multi-Patterning
by Daniel Payne on 01-03-2014 at 7:03 pm

I’ve been quite impressed that modern ICs use a lithography process with 193nm light sources to resolve final feature sizes at 20nm and smaller dimensions. We’ve been blogging about Double Patterning Technology (DPT) some 45 times in the past few years that enable 20nm fabrication, so one big question for me is, “How… Read More


The Rosetta Stone of Lithography

The Rosetta Stone of Lithography
by Paul McLellan on 11-20-2013 at 3:14 pm

At major EDA events, CEDA (the IEEE council on EDA, I guess you already know what that bit stands for) hosts a lunch and presentation for attendees and others. This week was ICCAD and the speaker was Lars Liebmann of IBM on The Escalating Design Impact of Resolution-Challenged Lithography. Lars decided to give us a whirlwind tour … Read More