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Already, rumors are swirling at the 2008 International Electron Device Meeting, which kicked off Sunday with two short courses here in cold and rainy San Francisco. A high-k expert said he has heard that Intel Corp. may shift its high-k/metal gate process for the 32 nm node, using a gate-first flow for the nFET and the replacement metal gate (RMG) approach for the pFET.

Maintaining the work function of the pFET gate electrode metal is the more difficult challenge, requiring the RMG approach. The replacement gate approach involves depositing the hafnium-based gate dielectric and putting in a polysilicon dummy gate which is stripped out and replaced after the high-temperature processing steps are completed. By Monday afternoon, Intel Senior Fellow Mark Bohr had scotc...Read More

It's IEDM time, and tis the season for Intel and IBM to throw snowballs at the competition. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr got in the spirit the other day while briefing reporters about  Intel’s 32 nm technology.

Bohr claimed that Intel was “more than a generation ahead of the competition.”

Asked what he meant, Bohr said his assessment was not simply the two-year period that Intel defines as a technology generation. “I include how tight the gate pitches are, how high the drive currents are, how soon we expect to ramp the production technology. What we are saying is that our drive currents, pitch, and earlier timing add up to a generation ahead of ...Read More

As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches in the United States, people in the U.S. chip manufacturing business should make a quick bow towards Abu Dhabi and take another moment to sing a bar or two of Billy Joel’s joyful New York State of Mind....Read More

Dean Freeman, the Gartner semiconductor equipment analyst, threw out a zinger when he came to Austin for a SEMI market outlook gathering. The early 450 mm wafers will be in the $15-20,000 dollar range, Freeman said in a matter-of-fact tone. After his presentation, he said large wafer customers such as Intel Corp. may get a break, paying $10-15,000 in the early going when pilot 450 mm production is underway.

“To enable the 450 transition the wafer price will have to go down, but it will be that high at the beginning,” he said, adding that Intel is the only company “really committed” to 450 mm development. When an MPU die reaches 400 mm² the MPU makers will make the transition to 450 mm wafers, Freeman said. Using through silicon vias (TSVs) t...Read More

Innovation is the fourth great economic input, along with labor, capital, and machines, and the hardest to predict. Three innovations which may pay off involve the semiconductor manufacturing and equipment industries: new transistors, printed electronics, and single electron trapping (SET) medical devices.

Yale Professor T.P. Ma has suggested Unipolar CMOS, which could be a game changer. The idea rests on a design which uses electrons for both channels, rather than the faster electrons for the n-channel and the slower holes for the p-channel. If it works, Ma's idea would extend silicon’s performance roadmap, provide for higher densities due to shared contacts, and simplify manufacturing by not requi...Read More

An executive at a major IC manufacturer likes to tell the story about a meeting in 1996 to discuss 300 mm wafers. One after another, CEOs of the major equipment companies said that they wanted nothing to do with 300 mm equipment, that they had no plans for 300 mm R&D. “I’m out of it,” they said, one after another. The next morning, the executive took a series of phone calls from the same set of CEOs, who told him, “What I said yesterday was just our public position. I want you to know that we want to work with you on 300 mm equipment.”

The executive believes the same kind of “melodrama” is going on now. All of the major equipment companies have 450 mm R&D programs going on, he said. The companies making automation equipment, w...Read More

The debate about the worthiness of high-k/metal gate technology brought to mind what Japanese semiconductor managers said about Hajime Sasaki, who ran NEC’s semiconductor operation back in the late 1980s. “He knows how to keep the fabs full,” they said.

The Empire State has invested ~$900M in the Albany NanoTech research complex, while IBM and other private companies have invested $3.5B in Albany. The result is a thriving R&D community, a technically vibrant IBM, and a public-private partnership that is likely to weather the current economic downturn. Money well spent.

The question now is the extent to which the U.S. financial crisis is likely to impact the ambitious growth plans for Albany NanoTech. New York gets fully 20% of its state income tax from the bonuses paid to Wall Street executives, and a third of the state’s overall revenues derive come from taxes on the financial industry. New York has an expected budget shortfall of $6B for the state this year. It gets worse: the expectation is that New Yo...Read More

Tomorrow, Sept. 12^th, marks the day 50 years ago when Jack Kilby demonstrated the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas.

Many people know the gist of the Kilby story, how the young Kansas native, the son of a manager of a Kansas electric cooperative, came to TI just before a company-wide summer vacation left the newly hired Kilby alone in the lab. After trying to build a tube version of an integrated “Micro-Module” that the U.S. military was seeking, Kilby grew pessimistic about the yields and costs of that approach. He turne...Read More

Will the market for high-brightness light emitting diodes (HB LEDs) add more sparkle to the nanoimprint lithography (NIL) sector? Patrik Lundström, CEO of Obducat AB (Malmo, Sweden) estimates that the LED vendors could buy at least 50 NIL tools in the next three or four years. Many of those LEDs would be used as backlights for LCD-based displays, televisions, and micro projectors. If LEDs become widely used for general lighting, the number of NIL tools sold to LED vendors each year could quickly double.

“We see more consumer electronics products coming with integrated LEDs to replace the current type of backlight in LCD screens. Several companies are pursuing that, while others are looking toward the automotive sector,” he...Read More

The competition between flash-based solid-state disk drives (SSDs) and bit patterned media HDDs is shaping up to be an intense race, although not a winner-take-all affair.

In mid-August, the patterned media camp got a big boost when Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) and the University of Wisconsin at Madison reported self-assembly techniques promising to ease the expense of creating templates for the nanoimprint lithography (NIL) steps in bit patterned media (BPM).  

At the same time, the SSD side got a lot of ink when Intel executives announced their ...Read More

Mergers and acquisitions activity has picked up in the semiconductor equipment and materials industry in the last few months (see a list below). Two of the biggest remain up in the air – the Applied/Francisco Partners bid to acquire ASMI, and the Sumitomo Heavy Industries attempt to acquire Axcelis Technologies. Another uninvited M&A move also remains unresolved: Cadence Design has its sights set on taking over Mentor Graphics, which the Department of Commerce is reviewing. Asyst also is being pursued.

Many more friendly M&A deals have gone forward. Gartner Inc. analyst Dean Freeman said the pace may have picked up due to the downturn. “It is in the nature of the time you are at,” Freeman said, noting that the valuations of many companies are at rel...Read More

The environmental impact of electronics manufacturing has become a prime concern of governments and people everywhere. A new book written and organized by Professor Sammy Shina, Green Electronics, Design and Manufacturing (McGraw Hill; 2008), provides a highly practical examination of how electronics companies can create products which meet environmental standards.

Green Electronics is aimed at managers and engineers; readers who seek a variety of perspectives on how to successfully negotiate the path to a “green” product. It is aimed at teams which seek to develop environmentally benign materials and manufacturing processes.

Shina spent two decades in industry after ...Read More

Bob Johnson, semiconductor manufacturing analyst at Gartner Inc., says there really isn’t any way around it: the equipment industry will recover when the memory makers do. Until then, it is going to be a “Six Flags kind of ride,” the veteran analyst said after Gartner issued a downward revision to its semiconductor capital equipment forecast for this year, predicting a 22.4% contraction.  

What about solar? Johnson said there are only a few semiconductor equipment companies which are “active players” in solar. “Solar is a simple process compared with semiconductors,” he said, adding that photovoltaics “won’t take up the slack” from a downtur...Read More

It now appears that IBM Corp. plans to implement a high-bandwidth silicon-on-insulator (SOI) embedded DRAM (eDRAM) for its server microprocessors at 45 nm, and then introduce high-k/metal gate technology at the 32 nm node.

Gary Patton, vice president of technology development at IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center (Fishkill, N.Y.) said, “We’ve done a lot of prototyping [of high-k] at 45 nm, and we are still assessing high-k for our systems business. For our systems [server] business, the focus at 45 is to get eDRAM into our technology because bandwidth is by far one of the most important technologies.”