By David W. Price, Douglas G. Sutherland and Jay Rathert Author’s Note: The Process Watch series explores key concepts about process control—defect inspection, metrology and data analysis—for the semiconductor industry. This article is the first in a five-part series on semiconductors in the automotive industry. In this article, we introduce some of the challenges involved in the automotive supply chain. Future articles in the series will address specific process control…
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The ConFab 2018 Update
A new wave of growth is sweeping through the semiconductor industry, propelled by a vast array of new applications, including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, automotive, 5G, the IoT, cloud computing, healthcare and many others. The big question facing today’s semiconductor manufacturers and their suppliers is how can they best position themselves to take advantage of this tremendous growth. Finding answers to that question is the goal of The…
Mott Memristor Chaos could make Efficient AI
Congratulations to Suhas Kumar, John Paul Strachan, and R. Stanley Williams of Hewlett Packard Labs in Palo Alto for showing not just how to make a Mott memristor, but that you can create controlled chaos with one. “We showed that this type of memristor can generate chaotic and nonchaotic signals,” says Williams, who invented the memristor based on theory by Leon Chua. An analysis of the material science and engineering…
The ConFab 2018 will be held May 20-23
The ConFab 2018, to be held May 20-23 in Las Vegas, will take a close look at the new applications driving the semiconductor industry, the technology that will be required at the device and process level to meet new demands, and – perhaps most importantly – the kind of strategic collaboration that will be required. It is this combination of business, technology and social interactions that make The ConFab so…
MEMS & Sensors Technical Congress 2017: Knowing Your Unknowns
By Karen Lightman, MEMS & Sensors Industry Group | SEMI As in life, knowing everything in MEMS and sensors is impossible. Often the best we can do is to “know the unknowns” because articulating what we do not yet understand allows us to seek answers so that we can stay competitive. MEMS and sensors supply chain members need to know what is “state of the art” in terms of technology,…
MEMS Mirrors for LIDAR
Clever integration of new microelectronic/nanoelectronic technologies will continue to provide increased functionalities for modern products. Light Imaging, Detection, And Ranging (LIDAR) technology uses lasers to see though fog and darkness, and smaller less expensive LIDAR systems are needed for autonomous driving applications now being developed by dozens of major companies around the world. A significant step in the right direction has been taken by the US government’s Lawrence Livermore National…
The ConFab Preview
The agenda is set for The ConFab, to be held May 14-17, 2017 in San Diego at the iconic Hotel del Coronado. While reviewing the abstracts for just the Monday morning session, it struck me how well our speakers will cover the complex opportunities and challenges facing the semiconductor industry. In the opening keynote, for example, Hans Stork, Senior Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, ON Semiconductor we will discuss…
Moore’s Law Smells Funny
…maybe we need “Integrated Cleverness Law” “Jazz is not dead, it just smells funny.” – Frank Zappa 1973 from Be-Bop Tango (Of The Old Jazzmen’s Church) Marketing is about managing expectations. IC marketing must position next-generation chips as adding significant new/improved functionalities, and for over 50 years the IC fab industry has leaned on the conceptual crutch of “so-called Moore’s Law” (as Gordon Moore always refers to it) to do…
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