At SEMICON West, Applied Materials announced a new selective gap fill tool to address the growing resistance issues in interconnect at small dimensions. I had the opportunity to discuss this new tool and the applications for it with Zhebo Chen global product manager in the Metal Deposition Products group at Applied Materials.… Read More
On Thursday July 9 Imec held a virtual technology forum. Imec is one of the premier research organizations working on semiconductor technology and their forums are always interesting. My area of interest is process technology and the following are my observation in that area from the forum.
Luc Van Den Hove
Luc Van Den Hove is the… Read More
The 2020 VLSI Technology Symposium was held as a virtual conference from June 14th through June 19th. At the symposium Imec gave an interesting paper on Buried Power Rails (BPR) and I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Anshul Gupta.
As logic devices continue to scale down metal pitch is reaching a limit. Imec defines a pitch… Read More
Moore’s Law has been about device density, specifically transistor density, increasing every certain number of years. Although cost is the most easily grasped advantage, there are two other benefits: higher performance (speed) and reduced power. When these benefits are compromised, they can also pose a scaling limitation.
Corona Curtails already quiet SPIE Litho conference
Our best guess is that attendance was off by 30% from last years SPIE conference due to a lack of travelers from many Asian areas obviously out of Corona fear. Even Intel, which is a few miles away was a virtual no-show with a mass cancellation.
More importantly, virtually all after… Read More
Imec is one of the premier semiconductor research organizations and at IEDM they presented dozens of papers. I had the opportunity to see several of the papers presented and interview 3 of Imec’s researchers.
Jan Van Houdt, DMTS ferroelectric and exploratory memory
I have had very interesting discussions with Imec researchers… Read More
Tuesday July 9th was the first day the show floor was open at Semicon. The following is a summary of some announcements I attended and general observations.
AMAT Announcement
My day started with an Applied Materials (AMAT) briefing for press and analysts where they announced “the most sophisticated system they have ever released”.… Read More
On Monday, July 8th Imec held a technology forum ahead of Semicon West. I saw the papers presented and interviewed three of the authors. The following is a summary of what I feel are the keys points of their research.
Arnaud Furnemont
Arnaud Furnemont’s talk was titled “From Technology Scaling to System Optimization”. Simple 2D … Read More
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference Imec presented several papers on EUV and Veeco presented about etching for EUV masks. I had the opportunity to see the presentations and speak with some of the authors. In this article I will summarize the key issues around EUV based on this research.
EUV is ramping up into high volume 7nm… Read More
Last week I attended the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. I gave two presentations, attended dozens of papers and conducted three interviews. I will be doing some detailed write ups particularly on EUV but I am waiting for the presentations from several of the papers. In the mean time I thought I would put some overall … Read More
