Semiconductors
Although TSMC can't claim to be the first fab to use extreme UV (EUV) lithography – that title goes to Samsung – they do get to claim to be the largest. As a result, the company has developed significant experience with EUV over the years, allowing TSMC to refine how they use EUV tooling to both improve productivity/uptime, and to cut down on the costs of using the ultra-fine tools. As part of the company's European Technology Symposium this week, they went into a bit more detail on their EUV usage history, and their progress on further integrating EUV into future process nodes. When TSMC started making chips using EUV lithography in 2019 on its N7+ process (for Huawei's HiSilicon), it held 42% of the...
Samsung Starts Mass Production of Chips Using Its 7nm EUV Process Tech
Samsung Foundry on Wednesday said that it had started production of chips using its 7LPP manufacturing technology that uses extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) for select layers. The new fabrication...
42 by Billy Tallis & Anton Shilov on 10/17/2018TSMC: First 7nm EUV Chips Taped Out, 5nm Risk Production in Q2 2019
Last week, TSMC made two important announcements concerning its progress with extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL). First up, the company has successfully taped out its first customer chip using its...
50 by Anton Shilov on 10/9/2018GlobalFoundries Enables Connectivity IP: New RF SOI and Ensigma BLE on 22FDX
GlobalFoundries this week made two important announcements concerning its radio and connectivity-related capabilities. First up, the company said that Imagination’s Ensigma connectivity IP is now available for its 22FDX...
2 by Anton Shilov on 9/27/2018Cadence Announces The Tensilica DNA 100 IP: Bigger Artificial Intelligence
Cadence is an industry player we don’t mention nearly enough as much as we should - they make a lot of IP and specialises in accelerator blocks which augment...
9 by Andrei Frumusanu on 9/19/2018Samsung Foundry Updates: 8LPU Added, EUVL on Track for HVM in 2019
Samsung recently hosted its Samsung Foundry Forum 2018 in Japan, where it made several significant foundry announcements. Besides reiterating plans to start high-volume manufacturing (HVM) using extreme ultraviolet lithography...
29 by Anton Shilov on 9/6/2018Micron to Expand Its Fab 6 in Virginia, Build New R&D Center
Micron this week announced plans to expand production of DRAM and NAND memory at its fab in Manassas, Virginia. In total, Micron intends to invest $3 billion into the...
11 by Anton Shilov on 8/31/2018AMD's 7nm CPUs & GPUs To Be Fabbed by TSMC, on Track for 2018 - 2019
With the announcement that its long-time manufacturing partner (and outright former fab) GlobalFoundries is dropping out of the race for bleeding-edge manufacturing nodes, the second big question of the...
28 by Ryan Smith & Anton Shilov on 8/27/2018GlobalFoundries Stops All 7nm Development: Opts To Focus on Specialized Processes
GlobalFoundries on Monday announced an important strategy shift. The contract maker of semiconductors decided to cease development of bleeding edge manufacturing technologies and stop all work on its 7LP...
127 by Anton Shilov & Ian Cutress on 8/27/2018Hot Chips 2018: Xilinx DNN Processors Live Blog
Xilinx has several talks this year at Hot Chips, and aside from the ACAP earlier in the day, the talk about their Deep Neural Network processor also looks interesting...
3 by Ian Cutress on 8/21/2018Hot Chips 2018: Going Deep on NVSwitch Live Blog (8:45am PT, 3:45pm UTC)
The first talk on Day 2 of Hot Chips is from NVIDIA, going into more detail about how the NVSwitch works with a lot more detail than from previous...
2 by Ian Cutress on 8/21/2018TSMC: Outbreak of Malware That Triggered Delays & Losses Caused by Software for New Tool
TSMC announced this week that it suffered a computer malware outbreak, resulting in a roughly 3 day outage for parts of the fab while systems were restored. As a...
42 by Anton Shilov on 8/9/2018MRAM Developer Day, GlobalFoundries Keynote Live Blog
Second Keynote today is from GlobalFoundries, Everspin's MRAM partner.
1 by Ian Cutress on 8/6/2018ASML Ships Twinscan NXT:2000i Scanner for 7nm and 5nm DUV
ASML, the company known for producing equipment for the manufacture of processors and semiconductors at foundries, has started to ship its new Twinscan NXT:2000i DUV (Deep Ultra Violet) scanner...
15 by Anton Shilov on 8/2/2018SK Hynix Set to Build a New Memory Fab
SK Hynix last week announced plans to build another semiconductor fab near its headquarters in Icheon, South Korea. The production facility is not going to be as big and...
16 by Anton Shilov on 7/30/2018Intel Provides Royalty-Free License for Data Bus to DARPA’s Modular Chips Initiative
Taking place this week is DARPA’s 2018 Electronic Resurgence Initiative (ERI) Summit, the defense research agency's first gathering to address the direction of US technology manufacturing as Moore's Law...
14 by Anton Shilov on 7/25/2018GlobalFoundries Announces 22FDX Milestone: $2 Billion in Design Wins
GlobalFoundries on Monday announced a milestone concerning its 22FDX-branded fully-depleted SOI low-power planar transistor platform. The company initiated volume production using the technology with yields and performance meeting expectations...
13 by Anton Shilov on 7/10/2018Arm and Samsung Extend Artisan POP IP Collaboration to 7LPP and 5LPE Nodes
Arm and Samsung Foundry this week announced plans to extend their collaboration to 7LPP and 5LPE process technologies. Under the terms of the agreement, Arm will offer Samsung Foundry...
23 by Anton Shilov on 7/6/2018UMC Acquires Fujitsu’s Stake in Semiconductor Joint Venture
Fujitsu Semiconductor and UMC on Friday said that the latter will acquire 100% ownership of Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor (MIFS), a joint venture between two companies. The move essentially ends...
2 by Anton Shilov on 6/29/2018Samsung to Pay $400 Million for Infringing FinFET Patent
A federal jury in Texas ordered Samsung Electronics to pay $400 million to a South Korean university for infringing one of fundamental patents related to double gate FinFET transistors...
33 by Anton Shilov on 6/19/2018GlobalFoundries Gives 7 nm Capacity Update, Mulls Skipping 5 nm
High-ranking executives of GlobalFoundries this month gave several updates concerning future plans of the contract maker of semiconductors. As it appears, in a bid to provide more tangible advantages...
19 by Anton Shilov on 5/31/2018