The fabless revolution in the digital semiconductor industry is no more, with just a few integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) remaining on the playing field, it is now the normal way to do business. However, the learning curve for each new process node continues as it always has, with a host of new technical challenges for the … Read More
The industry plans to use 193nm light at the 20nm, 14nm, and 10nm nodes. Amazing, no? There is no magic wand; scientists have been hard at work developing computational lithography techniques that can pull one more rabbit out of the optical lithography hat.
Tortured metaphors aside, the goal for the post-tapeout flow is the same… Read More
FinFETs are hot, carbon nanotubes are cool, and collaboration is the key to continued semiconductor scaling. These were the main messages at the 2013 Common Platform Technology Forum in Santa Clara.
The collaboration message ran through most presenations, like the afternoon talk by Subi Kengeri of GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Joe Sawicki… Read More
Can’t make it to Santa Clara? Join us online!
The detailed 2013 CPTF agenda is now up in preparation for the February 5th event at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is one of the rare times that you can get a free lunch! Watch this quick video to see what is in store for us this year. Dr. Paul McLellan and I will be there so please… Read More
While the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference is best known for IC manufacturing, computational lithography, mask preparation and other back-end topics, there is also a significant amount of interest in Design for Manufacturing (DFM) at the conference because some litho issues are best (or only) addressed by modifying the… Read More
Most embedded programming strategies involve decomposing the embedded application into chunks, which can then be executed as independent tasks. More advanced applications involve some type of data flow, and may attempt to execute operations in parallel where possible.… Read More
In my opinion, FinFETs will be the most significant piece of technology we, as semiconductor ecosystem people, will experience this decade. Seriously this is exciting stuff and one of the top search terms on SemiWiki for 6 months running. Here is a quick peek at what the top EDA companies will be talking about at the Common Platform… Read More
We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.
Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More
David Avercrombie of Mentor won the award for the best tutorial at the 2012 TSMC OIP for his presentation, along with Peter Hsu of TSMC, on Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in 20nm. The whole presentation along with the slides is now available online here. The first part of the presentation is an introduction to double … Read More
At TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor made technical presentations on four different topics, two of them co-presented with TSMC and LSI Corporation. Those presentations are described below with links to downloadable pdf presentation files.
Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in… Read More
