Memory pricing and margins are at highs as industry consolidation and semiconductor shortages drive the supply demand balance completely out of whack. A common theme of the memory industry has been continued consolidation. We are at only 3 leading edge DRAM producers, and the number of NAND producers is dwindling even with the … 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
At the 2021 VLSI Technology Symposium, Imec presented on Ruthenium (Ru) and Molybdenum (Mo) as alternate Word Line (WL) materials for 3D NAND Flash “First Demonstration of Ruthenium and Molybdenum Word lines Integrated into 40nm Pitch 3D NAND Memory Devices”. I had an opportunity to interview one of the authors: Maarten Rosmeulen.… Read More
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in February 2021, Regina Freed of Applied Materials gave a paper: “Module-Level Material Engineering for Continued DRAM Scaling”. Applied Materials provided me with the presentation and was kind enough to set up an interview for me with Regina Freed.
I also spoke to Regina Freed last… Read More
Semiconductor sales in 2020 were $439.0 billion, up 6.5% from $412.3 billion in 2019, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS).
We at Semiconductor Intelligence have been tracking the accuracy of semiconductor market forecasts from various sources for several years. We look at publicly available projections… Read More
The third quarter 2020 semiconductor market totaled $114 billion, up 11.0% from second quarter 2020, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS). The 3Q20 growth was the highest since 11.6% in 3Q16. The strong 3Q20 growth follows a 2.1% decline in 2Q20 versus 1Q20. The second quarter is normally a healthy growth … Read More
Getting out of NAND makes sense
The memory market is very tough, competitive and worst of all, very cyclical. Unless you have an iron… Read More
The pace of Moore’s Law scaling for monolithic integrated circuit density has abated, due to a combination of fundamental technical challenges and financial considerations. Yet, from an architectural perspective, the diversity in end product requirements continues to grow. New heterogeneous processing units are being… Read More
The global semiconductor market is headed for a double-digit decline for the year 2019 after a decline of 15.6% in first quarter 2019 from fourth quarter 2018. According to WSTS (World Semiconductor Trade Statistics) data, this was the largest quarter-to-quarter decline since a 16.3% decline in first quarter 2009, ten years … Read More
On the Sunday evening at IEDM last year, TechInsights held a reception in which Arabinda Das and Jeongdong Choe gave presentations that attracted a roomful of conference attendees.
This is the second part of the review of Jeongdong’s talk, we covered NAND flash technology in the last post. Jeongdong is a Senior Technical… Read More
