Apple Corp. recent purchased an old 200mm-diameter silicon wafer fab in San Jose capable of creating as small as 90nm device features. Formerly owned and operated by Maxim, the US$18.2M purchase reportedly includes nearly 200 working fab tools. Some people outside the industry have speculated that Apple might use this fab to do R&D on the A10 or other advanced logic chips, but this old tool-set is completely incapable of…
Ed’s Threads
MPU Cores and Legal Boors
As reported by The Register, AMD has been sued by a customer who claims that the number of Bulldozer cores in some Opteron and FX microprocessor (MPU) chips are fewer than advertised. The claim is based on the argument that a “real” MPU core has it’s own floating point unit for calculations, and that consumers were misled by product claims. I am not a lawyer (IANAL) and have no connections…
Thermoplastically Deformable Electronic Circuits
Philips is testing a technology developed by imec and CMST (imec’s associated lab at Ghent University) to create low-cost 3D LED packages. As shown at last month’s International Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging Society (IMAPS 2015) meeting, these thermoplastically deformable electronic circuits are already being integrated by Philips into LED lamp carriers, a downlight luminaire, and a omnidirectional light source. The technology is based on meander-shaped interconnects, which are patterned using …
EUV Cost at 1000 Daily Exposures
On October 14, 2015, ASML Holding N.V. (ASML) published its 2015 third-quarter results: Q3 net sales of €1.55 billion with gross margin of 45.4% (in line with guidance), and guided Q4 2015 net sales at approximately €1.4 billion and a gross margin of around 45%. Due to mismatched financial analyst expectations, Bloomberg reported that ASML’s stock price dropped ~7% in a single day of trading, despite the company also reporting…
Leti Shows MEMS on 300mm Wafers
As reported by EETimes from the European MEMS Summit last month, French research institute CEA-Leti has manufactured accelerometer MEMS devices on 300mm-diameter wafers. This technology is currently being transferred to Tronics Microsystems SA (Grenoble, France), which currently only manufactures on 200mm wafers. Since CEA-Leti has long functioned as the R&D group for STMicroelectronics (ST), and previously led the way for ST to produce MEMS chips on 200mm-diameter wafers, we may…
Silex’ Strategic Acquisition by China
A secretive investment holding company out of Hong Kong named GAE Ltd has acquired 98% of the shares in Silex Microsystems AB (Jarfalla, Sweden). The transaction took place on July 13th of this year when the former major shareholders agreed to sell all of their respective holdings, while Silex founder and CEO Edvard Kalvesten retains 2% of the shares in the company and continues his role as CEO and board…
300mm ams Fab Bet on IoT
Leading-edge IC fab investments are multi-billion-dollar risky bets. Insufficient demand for ICs dooms the line to economic failure regardless of the quality of design and manufacturing. Thus, it is a big deal that Austrian-headquartered ams AG—world leader in production of IC sensors, RFID chips, and power-supplies—has announced plans to set up a new silicon wafer manufacturing line in up-state New York. To date, ams’ leading fabs run 200mm diameter silicon…
Cross-point ReRAM Integration Claimed by Intel/Micron
The Intel/Micron joint-venture now claims to have successfully integrated a Resistive-RAM (ReRAM) made with an unannounced material in a cross-point architecture, switching using an undisclosed mechanism. Pilot production wafers are supposed to be moving through the Lehi fab, and samples to customers are promised by end of this year. HP Labs announced great results in 2010 on prototype ReRAM using titania without the need for a forming step, and then…
Single-electron Molecular Switch 4nm Across
A molecule rotating on the surface of a crystal can function as a tunnel-gate of a transistor, as shown by researchers from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Germany, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL), Japan, and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). Their complete findings are published in the 13 July 2015 issue of the journal Nature Physics. The team used a highly stable…
