Over the last couple of weeks, FD-SOI has been in the news with GlobalFoundries announcement of a 22nm FD-SOI process that will run in the Dresden Fab. Also, earlier in the week I talked to Thomas Skotnicki about the saga (and it is a saga) of how FD-SOI got from his PhD thesis to volume manufacturing and global deployment. But there … Read More
Tag: soi
Silicon Saxony!
The “Saxony” reference comes from the Holy Roman era which is now the tenth largest of Germany’s sixteen states and is divided into ten districts. The “Silicon” comes from the microchip makers in the Dresden area which is district #2. The largest of said chip makers is now GlobalFoundries so in the same vein that California has Silicon… Read More
ASMC 2015: GlobalFoundries 22nm SOI plans and more!
The Advance Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference was held on May 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] through May 6[SUP]th[/SUP] in Saratoga Springs, New York. ASMC brings a unique operational perspective to technical conferences related to semiconductors. In this blog I wanted to discuss what I thought was the most interesting paper of the… Read More
RF on SOI at GF
Unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade, you can’t help but notice the increased importance of RF: bluetooth, WiFi, 3G, LTE, NFC, RFID and more. There is a lot of digital design associated with these standards, especially the highest bandwidth ones, but they also all contain a radio, often called a modem.… Read More
IEDM Advanced CMOS Technology Platform Session
First I want recognize that IEDM once again provided all of the attendees with the proceedings as soon as we arrived at the conference, in fact the proceeding included every year of IEDM back to 1955. This is how a conference should be run! Anyone who read my blog about the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference will know how frustrating… Read More
IEDM 2014 Preview
The International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is one of the premier conferences for the presentation of the latest semiconductor processes and process technologies. IEDM is held every year in December alternating between San Francisco and Washington DC. This year IEDM will be held at the San Francisco Hilton on December… Read More
Virtual Fabrication: Not just for fabs. Fabless companies can benefit from more visibility into process technology
Ever since I started talking about Virtual Fabrication I have mostly looked at it from the manufacturers’ perspective, where it has obvious benefits to develop and model new process technology. But what about the fabless design concept and indeed even the semiconductor IP world that has spawned from it as well? It seems that Virtual… Read More
STM FD-SOI Manufacturing Double Source: Samsung
Let’s start with apologies: when guessing that SMIC would be the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] source foundry for ST-Microelectronics 28nm FD-SOI, I was wrong. To be honest, if I had made the assumption that Samsung was this double source, I would have generated dozen of comments, calling me “crazy blogger”…for the best. Announcing Samsung… Read More
The Alternative to FinFET: FD-SOI
Everywhere you turn these days you find FinFETs. Intel has had them since 22nm (they use the word Tri-gate but it is the same as what the world calls FinFET) and TSMC will have them at 16nm. So why FinFET? And is there an alternative?
The reason that regular bulk planar transistors have run out of steam is that the channel area underneath… Read More
Rapid Yield Optimization at 22nm Through Virtual Fab
Remember? During DAC2013 I talked about a new kind of innovation: A Virtual Fabrication Platform, SEMulator3D, developed by COVENTOR. Now, to my pleasant surprise, there is something to report on the proven results from this platform. IBM, in association with COVENTOR, has successfully implemented a 3D Virtual Fabrication… Read More