The New Normal for Semiconductor Manufacturing

The New Normal for Semiconductor Manufacturing
by Daniel Nenni on 05-27-2022 at 6:00 am

200mm 300mm Semiconductor Capacity

One of the recent live events I attended was the 2022 GSA Silicon Leadership Summit on May 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center (my favorite location). This was the first GSA live event in two years so it was a must attend gathering. This event targets semiconductor ecosystem executives (200+ people attended) so there were many… Read More


Podcast EP76: Geopolitical Forces on Semis, the Past, Present and Future with Terry Daly

Podcast EP76: Geopolitical Forces on Semis, the Past, Present and Future with Terry Daly
by Daniel Nenni on 05-04-2022 at 10:00 am

Dan is joined by Terry Daly, a 35-year veteran of the semiconductor industry, former senior VP at GLOBALFOUNDRIES and an executive at IBM Microelectronics. Terry is currently an independent consultant, and also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Emerging Market Enterprises at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts… Read More


The Lost Opportunity for 450mm

The Lost Opportunity for 450mm
by Scotten Jones on 04-15-2022 at 6:00 am

450mm Wafer SemiWiki


I spent several days this week at the SEMI International Strategy Symposium (ISS). One of the talks was “Can the Semiconductor Industry Reach $1T by 2030” given by Bob Johnson of Gartner. His conclusion was, that $1 trillion dollars is an aggressive forecast for 2030 but certainly we should reach $1 trillion dollars in the next 10… Read More


IBM at IEDM

IBM at IEDM
by Scotten Jones on 01-10-2022 at 6:00 am

Vertical FET process

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


The Journey of DRAM Continues

The Journey of DRAM Continues
by Arabinda Das on 09-26-2021 at 10:00 am

HBM

The field of DRAM is fascinating as it continues to grow and innovate. For the past ten years, I have often read that DRAM is running out of steam because of its difficulty to scale the capacitor, and yet it continues to evolve since invented by Dr. R. Dennard at IBM. In 1966, he introduced the concept of a transistor memory cell consisting… Read More


Is IBM’s 2nm Announcement Actually a 2nm Node?

Is IBM’s 2nm Announcement Actually a 2nm Node?
by Scotten Jones on 05-09-2021 at 6:00 am

Slide1

IBM has announced the development of a 2nm process.

IBM Announcement

What was announced:

  • “2nm”
  • 50 billion transistors in a “thumbnail” sized area later disclosed to be 150mm2 = 333 million transistors per millimeter (MTx/mm2).
  • 44nm Contacted Poly Pitch (CPP) with 12nm gate length.
  • Gate All Around (GAA), there are several ways
Read More

HCL Offers Tightly Integrated Design Management Solution for Virtuoso

HCL Offers Tightly Integrated Design Management Solution for Virtuoso
by Tom Simon on 05-18-2020 at 6:00 am

Flexium for Virtuoso

The road to a truly usable design management solution for electronic design has been a long and twisty one. Initially just handling EDA tool data was a struggle, let alone addressing mutli-user and multi-site needs. Of course, all along every EDA tool development company was internally using software revision control, which … Read More


IEDM 2019 – IBM and Leti

IEDM 2019 – IBM and Leti
by Scotten Jones on 01-08-2020 at 6:00 am

Slide3

IBM and Leti each presented several papers at IEDM including a joint nanosheet paper. I had the opportunity to sit down with Huiming Bu, director of advanced logic & memory tech and Veeraraghavan Basker, senior engineer from IBM and then in a separate interview Francois Andrieu, head of advanced CMOS laboratory and Shay Reboh,… Read More


IEDM 2019 – Applied Materials panel EUV Recap

IEDM 2019 – Applied Materials panel EUV Recap
by Scotten Jones on 12-23-2019 at 10:00 am

On Tuesday night of IEDM, Applied Materials held a panel discussion “The Future of Logic: EUV is Here, Now What?”. The panelists were: Regina Freed, managing director at Applied Materials as the moderator, Geoffrey Yeap, senior director of advanced technology at TSMC, Bala Haran, director of silicon process research at IBM, … Read More


IEDM 2019 to Highlight Innovative Devices for an Era of Connected Intelligence

IEDM 2019 to Highlight Innovative Devices for an Era of Connected Intelligence
by Scotten Jones on 08-28-2019 at 6:00 am

The IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting is in my opinion the leading technology conference to understand the current state-of-the-art in semiconductor process technology. Held each year in early December in San Francisco it is a must attend conference for anyone following technology development. The following is… Read More