2014 was a busy year for SemiWiki. We attended dozens of events, met hundreds of people (if not thousands), and published 810 blogs and a book that reached more than half of a million people. We collaborated throughout the fabless semiconductor ecosystem all year long and let me tell you it has been an amazing mind expanding experience,… Read More
Tag: semi
SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium, Half Moon Bay
Every January SEMI runs its Industry Strategy Symposium which is held at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay. This time it is January 11-14th. It is subtitled Riding the Wave of Silicon Magic.
I find it a fascinating event to attend. There is a lot of information to be had in the presentations, of course, but also a lot from talking to attendees.… Read More
SEMI Strategic Materials Conference and SEMICON Japan
I attended the SEMI Strategic Materials Conference earlier this month. I cover a pretty broad range of stuff on SemiWiki from embedded software and system-level design on down. But I usually stop at lithography and TCAD, which have a major impact on design and the whole fabless ecosystem. I hadn’t really thought about the… Read More
SEMICON Europa
This week it is SEMICON Europa in Grenoble in the heart of the French Alps.
SEMICON Europa 2014 opened yesterday at ALPEXPO in Grenoble with more than 400 exhibiting companies. Learn about the latest innovative technologies, products, applications and business opportunities both within the European community and globally.… Read More
Strategic Materials Conference
SEMI’s Strategic Materials Conference is coming up fast, on September 30th and October 1st next week at the Biltmore in Santa Clara. This year’s theme, Materials Matter—Enabling the Future of IC Fabrication and Packaging, will take a broad look at what is driving the demand for new materials, and how material suppliers … Read More
What Comes After FinFET?
So what comes after FinFETs? At 14/16nm (or 22nm if you are Intel) we had FinFET transistors, where the channel was no longer planar but stuck out of the wafer vertically, and the gate wrapped around it on 3 sides. The key thing that made FinFET transistors attractive was that the channel was thin so that the gate controlled it well. … Read More
EUV Pellicles
Shakespeare reckoned that a man went through seven stages in his life.All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
Well, an EUV mask seems to only go through three main stages:
[LIST=1]
Moderate growth and minor correction in semiconductors
At SEMICON West two weeks ago, Bob Johnson of Gartner presented the outlook for the semiconductor market, semiconductor capital spending, and wafer fab equipment spending. Thanks to Daniel Nenni for providing the link to the SEMI/Gartner Market Symposium presentations at https://sites.google.com/a/semi.org/market-symposium/home/speaker-presentations… Read More
EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More
Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
To wrap up Semicon West, let’s go back to Monday and the imec presentations. In fact, An Steegen’s presentation titled The Semiconductor Roadmap. She covered a lot of ground, but some of her slides contain a wealth of information. Let’s look at the options for 10nm, 7nm and a little 5nm, what imec call N10, N7 and… Read More