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
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
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
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]
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
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
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
My PhD is in distributed file systems so one of the key networking papers was Metcalfe and Boggs, 1976. It was titled Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks. This was the paper that introduced the world to Ethernet and to Bob Metcalfe. He was on stage yesterday here at Semicon West to give the afternoon… Read More
Yesterday I attended the IMEC Technology Forum at Semicon West. As always with IMEC, they present so much information it is like drinking from a firehose. I’ll say more about the future of process technology in a blog later this week, but this blog is about IMEC itself. It is an amazing success story. Let’s face it, if you were going … Read More
Next week it is Semicon West, the big equipment vendor tradeshow. I love to go since EDA and semiconductor and all the stuff we are interested in here at Semiwiki are driven by equipment capabilities, especially lithography. The highest viewed blogs I write tend to be ones on technologies that are just a bit out beyond the stuff people… Read More
