SPIE Advanced Lithography 2018 – EUV Status

SPIE Advanced Lithography 2018 – EUV Status
by Scotten Jones on 03-05-2018 at 7:00 am

This year the Advanced Lithography Conference felt very different to me than the last couple of years. I think it was Chris Mack who proclaimed it the year of Stochastics. EUV has dominated the conference for the last several years but in the past the conversation has been mostly centered on the systems, system power and uptime.

I … Read More


IEDM 2017 – Leti Gate-All-Around Stacked-Nanowires

IEDM 2017 – Leti Gate-All-Around Stacked-Nanowires
by Scotten Jones on 02-12-2018 at 12:00 pm

At IEDM in December I had a chance to interview Thomas Ernst about the paper “Performance and Design Considerations for Gate-All-around Stacked-NanoWires FETs” by Leti and STMicroelectonics.

Leti published the first stacked nanowire in 2006, it was very new then, now stacked nanowire/nanosheets are starting… Read More


IEDM 2017 – Controlling Threshold Voltage with Work Function Metals

IEDM 2017 – Controlling Threshold Voltage with Work Function Metals
by Scotten Jones on 01-26-2018 at 7:00 am

As I have said many times, IEDM is one of the premier conferences for semiconductor technology. On Sunday before the formal conference started I took the “Boosting Performance, Ensuring Reliability, Managing Variation in sub-5nm CMOS” short course. The second module in the course was “Multi-Vt Engineering… Read More


IBM Plays With The AI Giants With New, Scalable And Distributed Deep Learning Software

IBM Plays With The AI Giants With New, Scalable And Distributed Deep Learning Software
by Patrick Moorhead on 01-01-2018 at 11:00 am

I’ve been following IBM’s AI efforts with interest for a quite a while now. In my opinion, the company jump-started the current cycle of AI with the introduction of Watson back in the 2000s and has steadily been ramping up its efforts since then. Most recently, I wrote about the launch of PowerAI, IBM’s software toolkit solution toRead More


Photonics Summit Delivers High-Bandwidth Discussion on State of Silicon Photonics

Photonics Summit Delivers High-Bandwidth Discussion on State of Silicon Photonics
by Mitch Heins on 10-03-2017 at 12:00 pm

On September 6, 2017, Cadence Design Systems, Lumerical Solutions and PhoeniX Software hosted their second Photonics Summit. As with last year’s summit, this was a two-day event, with the first day including in a myriad of photonics presentations and the second day being a hands-on workshop. The hands-on workshop taught attendees… Read More


Your Car Sucks Data

Your Car Sucks Data
by Roger C. Lanctot on 08-07-2017 at 12:00 pm

“Cars Suck up Data about You. Where Does It All Go?” This was the ill-informed headline in the NYTimes last month. The headline echoes the thoughts of Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich (“Just one autonomous car will use 4,000 GB of data/day” – NetworkWorld) and Barclay’s Brian Johnson (“AnRead More


AI ASICs Exposed!

AI ASICs Exposed!
by Daniel Nenni on 08-01-2017 at 12:00 pm

Artificial intelligence, or AI is really heating up these days. The technology has been around for decades, but of late it is becoming quite a focus for applications such as data center analytics, autonomous vehicles and augmented reality. Why the rebirth? The trend appears to be driven by two forces – availability of data to train… Read More


SEMICON West – Advanced Interconnect Challenges

SEMICON West – Advanced Interconnect Challenges
by Scotten Jones on 07-28-2017 at 12:00 pm

At SEMICON West I attended the imec technology forum where Zsolt Tokei presented “How to Solve the BEOL RC Dilemma” and the SEMICON Economics of Density Scaling session where Larry Clevenger of IBM presented “Interconnect Scaling Strategic for Advanced Semiconductor Nodes”. I also had the opportunity… Read More


The 2017 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape

The 2017 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape
by Scotten Jones on 12-27-2016 at 6:00 pm

In early September of 2016 I published an article “The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape” that proved to be very popular with many views, comments and reposting’s. Since I wrote that article a lot of new data has become available enabling some projections to be replaced by actual values and new analysis… Read More