The International Electron Devices Meeting started its 56th session last week on Sunday in San Francisco. This year the program appears to more academic than in previous years, and this was confirmed by the conference chair in his opening address…
IEDM Next Week!
Next Sunday the great and the good of the electron device world will be gathering in San Francisco for the 2010 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting. To quote the conference web front page, “IEDM has been the world’s main forum…
TI Ships 40-µm Fine Pitch Copper Pillar Flip Chip Packages
The week before Semicon West, Texas Instruments and Amkor released a joint announcement that they were shipping parts in fine pitch copper pillar packages. Mark Lapedus at EETimes picked the story up and added the detail that the latest OMAP…
Non-Intel HKMG Coming Soon? And 45LP Makes the Mainstream in Mobiles
The last few weeks have seen some announcements that finally seem to show that HKMG (high-k, metal-gate) processes other than Intel are coming into the real world. First, on September 7, Samsung showed off an engineering sample of their 32-nm…
Samsung’s Eight-Stack Flash Shows up in Apple’s iPhone 4
Back in 2005 Samsung made an announcement that they would be shipping eight die stacked in the same package. At the time it seemed remarkable, but we didn’t see it any time soon after that, so it got lost in…
The Bankability of PV Tech: The New Key to Success
A decidedly non-technical term was in vogue this week at the very technical 25th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference (EUPVSEC). The term “bankability” was often used to describe the likelihood of success of a given technology. In these days of…
3 Facts from EUPVSEC
The one and only driving factor in the photovoltaics industry is cost per Watt. This is primarily a function of efficiency – how much of the sun’s power is converted to electricity — and the cost of manufacturing and installation.…
10 million solar roofs in U.S. bill passes
The Ten Million Solar Roofs Act of 2010 (S. 3460) was was passed by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee by a vote of 13 to 10 on July 21, 2010. It was introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, a member…
Winbond Adopts Qimonda’s Buried Wordline Technology – Metal Gates Come to DRAMs
Before Qimonda’s unfortunate demise last year, they delivered an impressive paper at IEDM 2008 [1] describing a “buried wordline” (BwL) DRAM stack-cell structure. This was a marked change from their earlier technology, as until this point all of their product…
Where Have All the New Apps Gone?
Increasingly, we are hearing about consolidation in the semiconductor industry. Bill McClean of IC Insights has perhaps pointed this out most clearly, noting that the top 10 capacity leaders held about 60% of the total 2009 worldwide IC capacity, and…
