Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura provided the keynote address to the attendees at the 57th annual Electronic Materials Conference held this week in Columbus, Ohio. His talk on “The History and Developments of InGaN-based LEDs and Laser Diodes” informed and entertained the audience of materials researchers, particularly since he followed first-principles of materials science and his natural inspiration to create the world’s first commercially viable blue LEDs over 20 years ago.…
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ALD of Crystalline High-K SHTO on Ge
Alternative channel materials (ACM) such as germanium (Ge) will need to be integrated into future CMOS ICs, and one part of the integration was shown at the recent Materials Research Society (MRS) spring meeting by John Ekerdt, Associate Dean for Research in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, in his presentation on “Atomic Layer Deposition of Crystalline SrHfxTi1-xO3 Directly on Ge (001) for High-K Dielectric Applications.” Strontium…
Bottoms-up ELD of Cobalt Plugs
As reported in more detail at Solid State Technology, during the IEEE IITC now happening in Grenoble, imec and Lam showed a new Electroless Deposition (ELD) cobalt (Co) process that is claimed to provide void-free bottoms-up pre-filling of vias and contacts. The unit-process is intended to be integrated into flows to produce scaled interconnects for logic and DRAM ICs at the 7nm node and below. Co-incidentally at IITC this year,…
IoT, Healthcare and 5G to Drive RF and Microwave
Imagine the world in 2020, only five years from now. If predictions hold true, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet (creating the Internet of Things), through smart homes, smart cities, smart factories, smart everything. Two recent Cisco studies show there’s $19 trillion in IoT value is at stake in the private ($14.4 trillion) and public ($4.6 trillion) sectors. The studies see, for example, $2.5 trillion…
CMP Slurry Trade-offs in R&D
As covered at SemiMD.com, the CMP Users Group (of the Northern California Chapter of The American Vacuum Society) recently held a meeting in Albany, New York in collaboration with CNSE, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and SEMATECH. Among the presentations were deep dives into the inherent challenges of CMP slurry R&D. Daniel Dickmann of Ferro Corporation discussed trade-offs in designing CMP slurries in his presentation, “Advances in Ceria Slurries to Address Challenges…
Karen’s Hamburg MEMS Roadtrip – A Great Gig
By Karen Lightman, Executive Director, MEMS Industry Group My favorite kind of business travel is when I can combine it with either a visit with friends/family or a site visit to a MEMS Industry Group (MIG) member company. This month, before I headed to Copenhagen to host MEMS Executive Congress Europe 2015, I had the pleasure of doing both. In the immortal words of the Beatles, I went to Hamburg because…
Batteries? We don’t need no stinking batteries.
We’re still used to thinking that low-power chips for “mobile” or “Internet-of-Things (IoT)” applications will be battery powered…but the near ubiquity of lithium-ion cells powering batteries could be threatened by capacitors and energy-harvesting circuits connected to photovoltaic/thermoelectric/piezoelectric micro-power sources. At ISSCC2015 in San Francisco last week, there were several presentations on novel chip designs that run on mere milliWatts (µW) of power, and the most energy efficient circuit blocks now…
IoT and The ConFab 2015
I’m delighted to announce the keynotes and other key speakers for The ConFab 2015, to be held May 19-22 at The Encore at The Wynn in Las Vegas. Our first keynote, on Wednesday, will be Ali Sebt, President and CEO of Renesas America, who will provide his insight on monetizing the Internet of Things. He’ll discuss how intelligent and connected platforms will enable new value chains based on a platform…
Oscar for DMD Inventor Hornbeck
Kudos to Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck, the extended team at Texas Instruments (TI) that has worked on Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) technology, and to the TI executives who continued to fund the R&D through years of initial investment losses. Hornbeck has been awarded an Academy Award® of Merit (Oscar® statuette) for his contribution to revolutionizing how motion pictures are created, distributed, and viewed using DMD technology (branded as the DLP®…
Reframing the Roadmap: ITRS 2.0
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductor (ITRS) is being reframed to focus more on end applications, such as smartphones and micro-servers. Labeled ITRS 2.0, the new roadmap is a departure from a strong focus maintaining the path defined by Moore’s Law. The original ITRS was published in 1992 at the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors; it became the ITRS in 1998. In an IEEE paper published late last year titled…
