I spent the day at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay. The early part of the day was devoted to technology challenges. Obviously everyone did not say exactly the same things, and had a little bit of a different spin depending on what business they are in. But there was a lot of commonality between Intel, IBM, Xilinx… Read More
Tag: euv
Lithography: Future Technologies
The first part of Lars Liebmann’s ICCAD keynote about lithography was on the changes in lithography that have to us to where we are today. In some ways it was an explanation of why we have the odd design rules, double patterning etc that we have in 20nm and 16nm processes. The second part of his talk was a look forward to how we might… Read More
Semicon: Multiple Patterning vs EUV, round #2
Round #1 was here.
In the EUV corner were Stefan Wurm of Sematech (working on mask issues mostly) and Skip Miller of ASML who are the only company making EUV steppers (and light sources, they acquired Cymer).
You may know that the biggest issue in EUV is getting the source brightness to have high enough energy that an EUV stepper has … Read More
Semicon: Multiple Patterning vs EUV, round #1
If you want to know the state of play in lithography, there is no better place than the special session on lithography at Semicon West. This year was no exception. The session was given the punchy title Still a tale of 2 paths: multi-patterning lithography at 20nm and below: EUVL source and infrastructure progress.
In the blue corner… Read More
SEMICON West: My Top Picks
I will be at Semicon West from 9th to 11th July in Moscone, San Francisco. Of course there are lots of interesting sessions but here are two that I think are especially important to get a good impression of the way things are going in the future from experts. The two most interesting questions about the future are what comes after 14nm,… Read More
What does 3D IC, FinFETs, and EUV have in common?
They are three of the top trending terms on SemiWiki and three of the hot topics at this year’s Semicon West:
In its 43rd year, SEMICON West is the flagship annual event for the global microelectronics industry. It is the premier event for the display of new products and technologies for microelectronics design and manufacturing,… Read More
Lithography from Contact Printing to EUV, DSA and Beyond
I used my secret powers (being a blogger will get you a press pass) to go to the first day of the SPIE conference on advanced lithography a couple of weeks ago. Everything that happens to with process nodes seems to be driven by lithography, and everything that happens in EDA is driven by semiconductor process. It is the place to find … Read More
No EUV before 7nm?
I was at the Common Platform Technology Forum this week. One of the most interesting sessions is IBM’s Gary Patton giving an overview of the state of semiconductor fabrication. Then, at lunchtime, he is one of the people that the press can question. In this post, I’m going to focus on Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) lithography.… Read More
Wafer Costs: Out of Control or Not?
I didn’t attend the International Electronic Device Meeting (IEDM) earlier this month, but there have been a lot of reports on the inter webs especially about 20nm and 14nm processes. Some of this is really geeky stuff but I think that perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve read about is summarized in this chart:
This… Read More
Waiting or EUV – Another View on the ReRAM Roadmap
It is ‘Quarterly’ financial report time for many companies and one can occasionally find some interesting snippets in the transcripts of the calls which normally accompany these announcements. For example, SanDisk appear to have an encouraging quarter, reversing sales declines seen through Q1 and Q2. However, what caught … Read More