The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. In the late 1980s red and green LEDs had been around for decades, but despite large programs in both academia and industry there had been almost no R&D progress in blue LEDs (this editor did process…
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IBM Shows Graphene as Epi Template
Last month in Nature Communications (doi:10.1038/ncomms5836) IBM researchers Jeehwan Kim, et al. published “Principle of direct van der Waals epitaxy of single-crystalline films on epitaxial graphene.” They show the ability to grow sheets of graphene on the surface of 100mm-diameter SiC wafers, the further abilitity to grow epitaxial single-crystalline films such as 2.5-μm-thick GaN on the graphene, the even greater ability to then transfer the grown GaN film to any…
Sensory Shanghai
By Stephen Whalley, Chief Strategy Officer, MEMS Industry Group It was over 10 years ago that I last visited Shanghai and oh my, how things have changed, most visibly, the skyline. Looking across the Huangpu River from The Bund back then, I clearly remember the ‘Pearl’ TV tower and a few tall buildings and thought how impressive it looked. Now, the view is an even more sumptuous feast for the…
Leti integrates everything
Now I know how wafers feel when moving through a fab. Leti in Grenoble, France does so much technology integration that in 2010 it opened a custom-developed people-mover to integrate cleanrooms (“Salles Blanches” in French) it calls a Liaison Blanc-Blanc (LBB) so workers can remain in bunny-suits while moving batches of wafers between buildings. I got to ride the LBB from the 300mm diameter wafer silicon CMOS and 200mm diameter…
Internet-of-Things Infographic
The global IoT market is poised for explosive growth. By 2020, the market is expected to soar to $7.1 trillion. This infographic, courtesy of Jabil, gives an good overview of what will be connected (even garbage bins!).
The Second Shoe Drops – Now We Have the Samsung V-NAND Flash
By Dick James, Senior Technology Analyst, Chipworks Two weeks ago, we posted about the TSMC 20nm product that we had in-house; now after waiting for a year since Samsung’s announcement of V-NAND production, we have that in the lab and can start to see what it looks like. The vertical flash was first released in an enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) last year, in 960 GB and 480 GB versions, but with no model…
The Second Shoe Drops – Now We Have the Samsung V-NAND Flash
By Dick James, Senior Technology Analyst, Chipworks Two weeks ago, we posted about the TSMC 20nm product that we had in-house; now after waiting for a year since Samsung’s announcement of V-NAND production, we have that in the lab and can start to see what it looks like. The vertical flash was first released in an enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) last year, in 960 GB and 480 GB versions, but with no model…
Chasing IC Yield when Every Atom Counts
Increasing fab costs coming for inspection and metrology At SEMICON West this year in Thursday morning’s Yield Breakfast sponsored by Entegris, top executives from Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries, and Applied Materials discussed the challenges to achieving profitable fab yield for atomic-scale devices (Figure source is the ITRS 2013 Yield Chapter). Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, recording was not allowed and copies of the presentations could not be shared. Qualcomm…
Moore’s Law is Dead – (Part 4) Why?
We forgot Moore merely meant that IC performance would always improve (Part 4 of 4) IC marketing must convince customers to design ICs into electronic products. In 1965, when Gordon Moore first told the world that IC component counts would double in each new product generation, the main competition for ICs was discrete chips. Moore needed a marketing tool to convince early customers to commit to using ICs, and the…
TSMC 20nm Arrives – The First Shoe Drops
By Dick James, Senior Technology Analyst, Chipworks For us at Chipworks interested in leading edge processes, 2014 so far has been the year of waiting for parts and processes that have been announced, but not shown up in the world of commercial production. It will surprise no-one in the business that they are Intel’s 14-nm, the 20-nm products from any of the big three foundries (in particular TSMC), and vertical…
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