All Things Semiconductor!
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
Part 4 of this series discussed how a transistor Extension could be fabricated in a planar device without using an implant operation, and is instead formed using a preferential etch followed by a selective epitaxial deposition. This final installment of the series will present the formation of an Extension in a FinFET transistor… Read More
The problem of traditional FinFET Extension Implant doping concerns the awkward 3-dimensional structure of the fin. Because the Extension Implant defines the conductive electrical pathway between the Source/Drains and the undoped channel portion of the fin, it is essential that the fin be uniformly doped all three of its surfaces… Read More
The use of hard masks instead of photoresist for the Extension implant is an effective way to optimize the amount of dopant that is retained along the fin sidewalls for those fins that border along photoresist edges (as discussed in Part 1 of this series).
However, hard masks do nothing to address the dominant problem driving steeper… Read More
It’s no coincidence that the TSMC Symposium is right after the Q1 earnings call. This will allow TSMC to talk more freely and they certainly will, my opinion. It is a very interesting time in the semiconductor industry and TSMC, being the bellwether, can tell us what will happen the rest of the year and give us some 2020 insights.… Read More
TSMC and Samsung continue to raise the competitive bar for FinFET foundry market share with dueling announcements this week. As I mentioned previously in the blog Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019, FinFETs are the market to watch with the coming onslaught of 5G and AI chips on the edge, in the cloud, and in our autonomous… Read More
In an ANSYS seminar held at DesignCon 2019, Dr. Larry Williams, ANSYS Director of Technology, outlined how 5G design innovation can be accelerated through simulation. He posited that 5G will become a general-purpose technology that affects an entire economy, drastically alter societies and unleash a cascade of complementary… Read More
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations… Read More
China has always been an intriguing semiconductor puzzle that very few companies have solved and now it is much more puzzling with the current political meandering. The GlobalFoundries vision of having foundries all over the world was very appealing to me back in 2009 and even more so today. Remember, China consumes more than half… Read More
Technology scaling has made positive impacts on device performance, while creating challenges on the interconnects and the fidelity of its manufactured shapes. The process dimension scaling has significantly increased metal and via resistance for advanced nodes 7nm and onward, as shown in figures 1a,1b. Similar to a fancy… Read More
