For many year 2D NAND drove lithography for the semiconductor industry with the smallest printed dimensions and yearly shrinks. As 2D NAND shrunk down to the mid-teens nodes, 16nm, 15nm and even 14nm, the cells became so small that there were only a few electrons in each cell and cross-talk issues made further shrinks very difficult… Read More
Tag: samsung
First Thoughts from #54DAC!
This was my 34[SUP]th[/SUP] DAC, yes 34. It is a shame blogging did not exist back then because I would have liked to have read thoughts from my eager young mind, or maybe not. The first thing that struck me this year is the great content. Before DAC I review the sessions I want to see and this year there were many more than I had time for. … Read More
Samsung Details Foundry Roadmap
Samsung recently held a meeting where they laid out a detailed roadmap for their foundry business. On Tuesday June 1st, Daniel Nenni and myself had an interview with Kelvin Low, senior director of foundry marketing and business development to discuss the details of Samsung’s plans.… Read More
Memory drives semiconductor boom in 2017
The semiconductor market was down 0.4% in first quarter 2017 from 4Q 2016 and up 18.1% from a year ago, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS). The 0.4% decline in 1Q 2017 versus 4Q 2016 is strong compared to an average 4% decline from 4Q to 1Q over the previous five years. The relative strength in 1Q 2017 was driven… Read More
SEMICON Southeast Asia reflects strong equipment market
SEMICON Southeast Asia was held this week in Penang, Malaysia. Over 6500 people attended the conference to learn about the latest trends and equipment in semiconductor manufacturing.
Dr. Dan Tracy, Senior Director Industry Research and Statistics at SEMI, presented an optimistic outlook for the semiconductor equipment market… Read More
14nm 16nm 10nm and 7nm – What we know now
Last week Intel held a manufacturing day where they revealed a lot of information about their 10nm process for the first time and information on competitor processes continues to slowly come out as well. I thought it would be useful to summarize what we know now, especially since some of what Intel announced was different than what… Read More
Intel Manufacturing Day: Nodes must die, but Moore’s Law lives!
Yesterday I attended Intel’s manufacturing day. This was the first manufacturing day Intel has held in three years and according to Intel their most in depth ever.
Nodes must die
I have written several articles comparing process technologies across the leading-edge logic producers – GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Intel, Samsung… Read More
Samsung Should Just Buy eSilicon Already!
As you all know I’m a big fan of the ASIC business dating back to the start of the fabless semiconductor transformation where anybody could send a design spec to an ASIC company and get a chip back. The ASIC business model also started the smart phone revolution when Samsung built the first Apple SoCs for the iPhones and iPads.
Today … Read More
Succeeding with 56G SerDes, HBM2, 2.5D and FinFET
eSilicon presented their advanced ASIC design capabilities at a seminar last Wednesday evening. This event was closed to the press, bloggers and analysts, but I managed to get some details from a friend who attended. The event title was: “Advanced ASICs for the Cloud-Computing Era: Succeeding with 56G SerDes, HBM2, 2.5D and FinFET… Read More
SPIE 2017: EUV Readiness for High Volume Manufacturing
The SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference is the world’s leading conference addressing photolithography. This year on the opening day of the conference, Samsung and Intel presented papers summarizing the readiness of EUV for high volume manufacturing (HVM). In this article, I will begin by summarizing the EUV plans … Read More