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
Tag: semicon
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]
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
Bob Metcalfe Keynote at #semiconwest
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
IMEC Technology Symposium
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
GlobalFoundries Goes to Semicon West
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
SEMICON West 2014 Preview
There is a really big conference coming up in San Francisco…no, not DAC although of course that is coming up too. I’m talking about SEMICON West which is much bigger, filling all 3 Moscone exhibit halls. It is July 8-10th. It is, of course, the semiconductor equipment industry (and solar) show.
The opening keynote on… Read More
SEMICON China Shanghai 上海
SEMICON is not just the event in San Francisco every July, there are other SEMICONs around the world. Coming up next, Shanghai China. In fact there are four colocated events:
- SEMICON China 2014, March 18th-20th
- The 8th PV fab managers’ forum, March 17th-18th (all things PhotoVoltaic)
- FPD China 2014, March 18th-20th (all
3D: the Backup Plan
With the uncertainties around timing of 450mm wafers, EUV (whether it works at all and when) and new transistor architectures it is unclear whether Moore’s law as we know it is going to continue, and in particular whether the cost per transistor is going to remain economically attractive especially for consumer markets … Read More