As you know, I’ve been a bit of a bear about what is happening to wafer costs at 20nm and below. At the Common Platform Technology Forum last week there were a number of people talking about this in presentations and at Harvey Jones’s “fireside chat”.
At the press lunch I asked about this. There are obviously… Read More
Thisblog with a chart showing that the cost of given functionality on a chip is no longer going to fall is, I think, one of the most-read I’ve ever written on Semiwiki. It is actually derived from data nVidia presented about TSMC, so at some level perhaps it is two alpha males circling each other preparing for a fight. Or, in this… Read More
At Semicon, Ben Rathsack of Tokyo Electron America talked about directed self assembly (DSA) at the standing-room only lithography morning. So what is it? Self assembly involves taking two monomers that don’t mix and letting them polymerise (so like styrene forming polystyrene). Since they won’t mix they will … Read More
This is really the second part to this blog about the challenges of EUV lithography. The next speaker was Franklin Kalk who is CTO of Toppan Photomasks. He too emphasized that we can make almost arbitrarily small features but more and more masks are required (not, that I suspect, he would complain being in the mask business). For EUV… Read More
EUV is the great hope for avoiding having to go to triple (and more) patterning if we have to stick with 193nm light. There were several presentations at Semicon about the status of EUV. Here I’ll discuss the issues with EUV lithography and in a separate post discuss the issues about making masks for EUV.
It is probably worth … Read More
As part of the DFM Conference at the SPIE Advance Lithography symposium, the DFM committee is conducting an informal survey on the current state of Design For Manufacturability in the Semiconductor Industry.
Please take this anonymous 16 question survey to identify critical Design for Manufacturability (DFM) issues facing… Read More
Always in motion is the future. ~Yoda
For nearly ten years now, full-chip simulation engines have successfully used process models to perform OPC in production. New full-chip models were regularly introduced as patterning processes evolved to span immersion exposure, bilayer resists, phase shift masking, pixelated illumination… Read More
In part I of this series, we looked at the history of lithography process models, starting in 1976. Some technologies born in that era, like the Concorde and the space shuttle, came to the end of their roads. Others did indeed grow and develop, such as the technologies for mobile computing and home entertainment. And lithography … Read More
For a brief time in the 1990s, when 4X magnification steppers suddenly made mask features 4X larger, there was a period in the industry referred to as the “mask vendor’s holiday.” The party ended before it got started with the arrival of sub-wavelength lithography, and we all trudged back to the OPC/RET mines. Since then, the demands… Read More
