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
Tag: semicon
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
FD-SOI at 14nm
At the recent Semicon West, Michel Haond of ST Microelectronics had a presentation on 14nm FD-SOI, or what they more lengthily call UTBB FD-SOI (which when you expand it all out comes to Ultra Thin Body and Buried-Oxide Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator). When Chenming Hu (or whoever in his group) came up with the term FinFET it … 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]
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