The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape

The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape
by Scotten Jones on 09-03-2016 at 7:00 am

The leading edge semiconductor logic landscape has in recent years collapsed to just four companies. The following is a summary of what is currently known about each company’s plans and how they compare. ASML has analyzed many logic nodes and developed a formula that normalizes processes to a “standard node”.… Read More


SEMICON West – Harry Levinson and Mike Lercel Interview

SEMICON West – Harry Levinson and Mike Lercel Interview
by Scotten Jones on 08-02-2016 at 12:00 pm

On Tuesday morning at SEMICON I had the opportunity to sit down with Harry Levinson, Sr. Director of Technology Research and Sr. Fellow at Global Foundries and Michael Lercel, Director of Strategic Marketing at ASML to discuss the state of lithography.

I opened the discussion with a question about how we are going to address lithography… Read More


SEMICON West – Leti FDSOI and IOT, status and roadmap

SEMICON West – Leti FDSOI and IOT, status and roadmap
by Scotten Jones on 07-28-2016 at 7:00 am

On Tuesday, July 12th at SEMICON West I had an opportunity to sit down with Marie Semeria, the CEO of Leti and discuss the status and future of FDSOI. Leti pioneered FDSOI 15 years ago and has been the leading FDSOI research ever since.

Two years ago Leti and ST Micro demonstrated products on 28nm that are cost competitive with bulk technology.… Read More


IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – Moving the Electronics Industry Forward

IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – Moving the Electronics Industry Forward
by Scotten Jones on 06-02-2016 at 4:00 pm

IMEC is a technology research center located in Belgium that is one of the premier semiconductor research centers in the world today. The IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) is a two-day event attended by approximately 1,000 people to showcase the work done by IMEC and their partners.

Gary Patton is the Chief Technical Officer and Senior… Read More


EUV is coming but will we need it?

EUV is coming but will we need it?
by Scotten Jones on 04-12-2016 at 4:00 pm

I have written multiple articles about this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference describing all of the progress EUV has made in the last year. Source power is improving, photoresists are getting faster, prototype pellicles are in testing, multiple sites around the world are exposing wafers by the thousands and more. Read More


GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant

GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant
by Scotten Jones on 11-11-2015 at 8:00 am

In part one of this blog I described a visit to GlobalFoundries (GF) Fab 8 site in Malta New York by Daniel Nenni and myself. In this part 2 of the blog, I will describe the second day of our trip when we visited Fab 9 in Burlington Vermont. Before we got to Burlington I thought it would likely be a letdown after seeing the state-of-the-art… Read More


GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution

GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution
by Scotten Jones on 11-06-2015 at 12:00 pm

Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More


GlobalFoundries 14nm Process Update

GlobalFoundries 14nm Process Update
by Scotten Jones on 10-26-2015 at 12:00 pm

Last Monday Daniel Nenni and I had a conference call with Jason Gorss and Shubhankar Basu of Global Foundries to get an update on their 14nm process. Shubhankar is the product line manager for 14nm.

Global Foundries 14nm process is a FinFET on bulk process they licensed from Samsung and both companies supply the same process although… Read More


FD-SOI: GlobalFoundries 22nm Update

FD-SOI: GlobalFoundries 22nm Update
by Paul McLellan on 08-26-2015 at 7:00 am

As I said yesterday, last week was the GSA Analog/Mixed-Signal working group completely dedicated to FD-SOI. ST went first and had a presentation that was a mixture of an introduction to FD-SOI that I have covered times that are too numerous to mention. Then they did a dive into analog and RF capabilities for FD-SOI that went very … Read More


GlobalFoundries 22nm FD-SOI: What Happens When

GlobalFoundries 22nm FD-SOI: What Happens When
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2015 at 7:00 am

Earlier in the week I wrote about GlobalFoundries announcement of 22nm FD-SOI. At SEMICON West there were three events that filled in some more details. First, on Tuesday, a lunch presentation given by SOITEC who make the wafer blanks that FD-SOI requires. Then on Wednesday I sat down for an hour with Gary Patton and Subi Kengeri … Read More