The global semiconductor market in 2021 was $555.9 billion, according to WSTS data released by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). 2021 increased 26.2% from 2020, the largest annual increase since 31.8% in 2010, eleven years ago. We at Semiconductor Intelligence track publicly available semiconductor market forecasts… Read More
Kinam Kim is a longtime Samsung technologist who has published many excellent articles over the years. He is now the Chairman of Samsung Electronics, and he gave a very interesting keynote address at IEDM.
He began with some general observations:
The world is experiencing a transformation powered by semiconductors that has been… Read More
Standard Cell Scaling
Complex logic designs are built up from standard cells, in order to continue to scale logic we need to continually shrink the size of standard cells.
Figure 1 illustrates the dimensions of a standard cell.
Figure 1. Standard Cell Dimensions.
From figure 1 we can see that shrinking standard cell sizes requires… Read More
System on chip (SoC) based design has long been recognized as a powerful method to offer product differentiation through higher performance and expanded functionality. Yet, it comes with a number of limitations, such as high cost of development. Also, SoCs are monolithic, which can inhibit rapid adaptation in the face of changing… Read More
No matter how impressive the specifications are for an SoC, the power performance and area of the finished design all depend on the IP selected for the IO blocks. In particular, most SOCs designed for consumer and enterprise applications rely heavily on PCI Express. Because PCIe analog IP is critical to design success, Samsung … Read More
Now and again, I enjoy circling back to a topic on which I spent a good deal of time back in my Atrenta days – clock domain crossing analysis (CDC). This is an area that still has opportunity to surprise me at least, in this case looking at CDC analysis around MBIST logic. CDC for MBIST might seem strange. Isn’t everything in test mode synchronous… Read More
Semiconductor capital expenditures (CapEx) are on track for strong growth in 2021. For many companies the increase should continue into 2022. TSMC, the dominant foundry company, expects to spend $30 billion in CapEx in 2021, a 74% increase from 2020. TSMC announced in March it plans to invest $100 billion over the next three years,… Read More
Anyone who has read my previous articles about IEDM knows I consider it the premier conference on process technology.
Last year due to COVID IEDM was virtual and although virtual offers some advantages the hallway conversations that can be such an important part of the conference are lost. This year IEDM is returning as a live event… Read More
The field of DRAM is fascinating as it continues to grow and innovate. For the past ten years, I have often read that DRAM is running out of steam because of its difficulty to scale the capacitor, and yet it continues to evolve since invented by Dr. R. Dennard at IBM. In 1966, he introduced the concept of a transistor memory cell consisting… Read More
Intel presented yesterday on their plans for process technology and packaging over the next several years. This was the most detailed roadmap Intel has ever laid out. In this write up I will analyze Intel’s process announcement and how they match up with their competitors.
10nm Super Fin (SF)
10nm is now in volume production in three… Read More
