10nm, the View from IBM

10nm, the View from IBM
by Paul McLellan on 10-05-2014 at 7:01 am

On the Cadence booth at DAC, Lars Liebmann of IBM presented on the challenges of 10nm. As he put it, how the lithography folks are keeping things very interesting for the EDA tool development engineers. Although 14nm/16nm hasn’t yet ramped into HVM, the advanced work for tools and IP has all moved to 10nm. Although Lars gave… Read More


Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring

Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
by Paul McLellan on 07-12-2014 at 11:00 am

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


Triple Patterning

Triple Patterning
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2014 at 1:00 pm

As you can’t have failed to notice by now, 28nm is the last process node that does not require double patterning. At 20nm and below, at least some layers require double patterning. The tightest spacing is typically not the transistors but the local interconnect and, sometimes, metal 1.


In the litho world they call double patterning… Read More


The Rosetta Stone of Lithography

The Rosetta Stone of Lithography
by Paul McLellan on 11-20-2013 at 3:14 pm

At major EDA events, CEDA (the IEEE council on EDA, I guess you already know what that bit stands for) hosts a lunch and presentation for attendees and others. This week was ICCAD and the speaker was Lars Liebmann of IBM on The Escalating Design Impact of Resolution-Challenged Lithography. Lars decided to give us a whirlwind tour … Read More