Intel recently released an exceptional video providing an insightful chronology of MOS transistor technology. Evolution of Transistor Innovation is a five-minute audiovisual adventure, spanning 50 years of Moore’s Law. Some of the highlights are summarized below, with a few screen shot captures – the full video is definitely… Read More
Last Thursday Intel held their investors meeting, in this write up I wanted to focus on my areas of coverage/expertise, process technology and manufacturing.
Technology Development presented by Ann Kelleher
Last year Intel presented their Intel Accelerated plan and, in this meeting, we got a review of where Intel stands on that… Read More
There’s a quiet upheaval happening in the semiconductor industry. The rules that have always governed the industry are fraying, undoing assumptions that we took for granted, that was pounded into us in school. The irreproachable Moore’s Law, that exponential progress will make things cheaper, better,… Read More
Kinam Kim is a longtime Samsung technologist who has published many excellent articles over the years. He is now the Chairman of Samsung Electronics, and he gave a very interesting keynote address at IEDM.
He began with some general observations:
The world is experiencing a transformation powered by semiconductors that has been… Read More
IBM transferred their semiconductor manufacturing to GLOBALFOUNDRIES several years ago but still maintains a multibillion-dollar research facility at Albany Nanotech. IBM is very active at conferences such as IEDM and appears to have a good public relations department because they get a lot of press.
At the Litho Workshop … Read More
Standard Cell Scaling
Complex logic designs are built up from standard cells, in order to continue to scale logic we need to continually shrink the size of standard cells.
Figure 1 illustrates the dimensions of a standard cell.
Figure 1. Standard Cell Dimensions.
From figure 1 we can see that shrinking standard cell sizes requires… Read More
I was asked to give a talk at the 2021 ISS conference and the following is a write up of the talk.
The title of the talk is “Logic Leadership in the PPAC era”.
The talk is broken up into three main sections:
The next transition from current FinFET devices at advanced process nodes is the “nanosheet” device, as depicted in the figure below. [1]
The FinFET provides improved gate-to-channel electrostatic control compared to a planar device, where the gate traverses three sides of the fin. The “gate-all-around” characteristics… Read More
As I have discussed before, I believe that IEDM is the premier technical conference for understanding leading edge process technologies. Beginning this coming weekend, this year’s edition of IEDM will be held virtually, and I highly recommend attending.
The conference held a press briefing last Monday. The tutorial and short… Read More
With the announcement of early PDK availability for the 3nm GAA process node, designers are extremely interested in the characteristics of the new “gate-all-around” transistor structure and how it compares to the existing FinFET device. The GAA transistor has been denoted as a (horizontal) nanowire or nanosheet.
I will talk… Read More
