Paul Farrar, general manager of the G450C consortium, said early work has demonstrated good results and that he sees no real barriers to implementing 450mm wafers from a technical standpoint. Speaking at the SEMI ISS meeting in January, Farrar showed impressive results from, etch, CVD, PVD, CMP, furnaces, electroplating, wet cleans and lithography processes and said the inspection/metrology tools were in place to measure results. “I don’t believe we will…
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50 years ago: February 1964
In February of 1964, The Beatles landed for the first time at JFK in New Work and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9th. Their song “I want to hold your hand” – their 1st #1 hit – was still #1 after 7 weeks. France & Great-Britain signed an accord over building the channel tunnel (construction for the “chunnel” began in 1988; it opened in 1992). The GI…
Exploring the MEMS-Enabled Life: A Preview of MEMS Executive Congress Europe 2014
By Karen Lightman, executive director, MEMS Industry Group Munich, Germany is one of my favorite cities in the world. If you agree or if you’ve never been there, I have the perfect opportunity for you to join me: MEMS Industry Group’s (MIG’s) MEMS Executive Congress Europe 2014 will be held at the beautiful Sofitel Hotel Bayerpost on March 10-11. The theme of our third European Congress is the “MEMS-enabled life,”…
Intel’s e-DRAM Shows Up In The Wild
When Intel launched their Haswell series chips last June, they stated that the high-end systems would have embedded DRAM, as a separate chip in the package; and they gave a paper at the VLSI Technology Symposium [1] that month, and another at IEDM [2]. It took us a while to track down a couple of laptops with the requisite Haswell version, but we did and now we have a few…
Intel’s e-DRAM Shows Up In The Wild
When Intel launched their Haswell series chips last June, they stated that the high-end systems would have embedded DRAM, as a separate chip in the package; and they gave a paper at the VLSI Technology Symposium [1] that month, and another at IEDM [2]. It took us a while to track down a couple of laptops with the requisite Haswell version, but we did and now we have a few…
High cost per wafer, long design cycles may delay 20nm and beyond
Handel Jones, founder and CEO of International Business Strategies (IBS), spoke at SEMI’s Industry Strategy Symposium last week, focusing on key trends, factors impacting the growth of the industry and the migration to smaller feature dimensions. He is bullish about 2014 and industry innovation, but cautious about how quickly the industry will move to new technology nodes due to higher costs, and long design cycles. Overall, he said he believed…
The magic behind the gadget and the need for innovation
Rick Wallace, president and CEO of KLA-Tencor, provided the keynote talk at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) this year, held Jan 12-15 in Half Moon Bay, CA. He said he believes the semiconductor industry might be facing a “Concorde” moment, referring to the demise of supersonic passenger transport, the last flight of which was on 24 October 2003. “That failed not because of technology but because of economics,” Wallace…
50 years ago: January 1964
The origin of Solid State Technology began in 1958, the same year that Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments invented the integrated circuit (the invention of the transistor is credited to Bell Labs; the first transistor was demonstrated on December 23, 1947). The initial name of the magazine was “Semiconductor Products” and that was changed to “Semiconductor Products and Solid State Technology” by 1962. In this news series, we’ll look…
Is It Time for A Roadmap for Equipment and Materials?
Hopefully everyone is familiar with the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS). It was launched in 1992, when the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) coordinated the first efforts of producing what was originally The National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (NTRS). This roadmap of requirements and possible solutions was generated three times in 1992, 1994, and 1997. The NTRS provided a 15-year outlook on the major trends of the semiconductor industry. As…
Challenges of 10nm and 7nm CMOS at IEDM
The International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) was held in Washington, D.C. this week. I attended a short course on Sunday focused on the Challenges of 10nm and 7nm CMOS Technologies, organized by Aaron Thean of imec. The speakers were Frederic Boeuf of ST Microlelectronics, who gave a general overview of drivers and challenges; Zsolt Tokei of imec, who spoke on interconnect challenges; Andy Wei of GLOBALFOUNDRIES who talked about process…
