Most designers are not using FinFETs yet, however the increased transistor density and power advantages they offer are compelling. Smaller feature sizes have been a consistent driver in semiconductor technology. Eventually the market will move more and more to FinFET processes, increasingly leaving behind planar transistors.… Read More
A little ago, I was looking at the top20 semiconductor companies in the world and was surprised to see a couple of large companies in Taiwan and South Korea garnering >34% of total sales (See – Look who is Leading the World Semiconductor Business). This time it’s another surprise, when I look at IC Insights report on global 300mm… Read More
By Jeff Wilson, Mentor Graphics and Anderson Chiu, TSMC
At this year’s TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor Graphics and TSMC co-presented some results of the ECO Fill flow developed for TSMC customers working at advanced nodes. Here is a summary of the presentation. (TSMC customers can access the presentation… Read More
This week is IEDM. Three of the presentations today were by TSMC, Intel and IBM going over some of the details of their 14/16nm processes. They don’t provide the slides at IEDM, just the single page papers so this may end up being a somewhat random collection of facts.
TSMC were up first. They talked about the improvements that… Read More
With all the talk about 14/16nm and 10nm it is important to realize that older processes are still important. Eventually 16nm may end up being cheaper than 28nm but for the time being 28nm seems to be a sort of sweet spot, not just cheaper than every process that came before it (which was true for every new node) but also cheaper than every… Read More
Last week was ASML’s investor day. I wasn’t there and they haven’t yet got the material posted on their website, so this is all second hand information. As you know, if you have read any of my comments on EUV, I have been dubious about whether EUV would ever work for production.
The three big problems seem to be:
The simple answer is when everything in the world is smart. But if you think deeply, you would find that the continuous progression to make things easy in life is what makes the world smarter day-by-day – the sky is the limit. In the world of computing, consider the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century era when humanbrain was used as a computer … Read More
File this one under funny things journalists are paid to say. Last week the Korea Times reported that Apple had “designated” Samsung as the primary supplier of the next Apple SoC. In response, the Chinese Commercial Times reported that TSMC is to supply the Apple A9 chip despite competition from Samsung. Since SemiWiki readers … Read More
Intel’s investor meeting was held yesterday and for me the presentation that is most interesting is Bill Holt’s. The presentations are available on the Intel website: Intel Corporation – Presentations Material 2014. Here is the 2013 version of this presentation: Intel Corporation – Presentations Materials 2013… Read More
As I wrote last week there is a whole list of companies on LinkedIn with people working on TSMC 16nm. Today TSMC released a list of customers that have risk production 16FF+ silicon. Most of us knew this already but now we can talk about it in more detail. This is a really big deal for the FinFET doubters out there. Just because Intel had… Read More
