Semiconductors
Optical connectivity – and especially silicon photonics – is expected to become a crucial technology to enable connectivity for next-generation datacenters, particularly those designed HPC applications. With ever-increasing bandwidth requirements needed to keep up with (and keep scaling out) system performance, copper signaling alone won't be enough to keep up. To that end, several companies are developing silicon photonics solutions, including fab providers like TSMC, who this week outlined its 3D Optical Engine roadmap as part of its 2024 North American Technology Symposium, laying out its plan to bring up to 12.8 Tbps optical connectivity to TSMC-fabbed processors. TSMC's Compact Universal Photonic Engine (COUPE) stacks an electronics integrated circuit on photonic integrated circuit (EIC-on-PIC) using the company's SoIC-X packaging technology. The foundry says that usage...
Samsung Foundry Updates: 7nm EUV, 10LPP, and 14LPC
Earlier this week, Samsung announced a number of updates on the foundry side of their business. While process technology might not be necessarily as interesting as the actual end...
54 by Joshua Ho on 4/22/2016EUV Lithography Makes Good Progress, Still Not Ready for Prime Time
At the recent annual SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Intel, TSMC and other leading semiconductor companies said that significant strides have been made in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) over the...
38 by Anton Shilov on 3/10/2016Samsung Announces Second-Gen 14nm Low Power Plus (14LPP) Process Now In Mass Production
Today Samsung Semiconductor officialy announces mass production for its second generation 14nm FinFET manufacturing node. Early last year we saw Samsung announce mass production of its first generation FinFET...
32 by Andrei Frumusanu on 1/14/2016The Samsung Exynos 7420 Deep Dive - Inside A Modern 14nm SoC
Over the past few years it’s been somewhat expected tradition for Samsung Electronics to employ a strategy of multi-sourcing the SoC for their mobile devices. Most notably it’s on...
114 by Andrei Frumusanu on 6/29/2015Nantero Exits Stealth: Using Carbon Nanotubes for Non-Volatile Memory with DRAM Performance & Unlimited Endurance
The race for next generation non-volatile memory technology is already on at full throttle. We covered Crossbar’s ReRAM announcement last year and last week a very exciting company with...
35 by Kristian Vättö on 6/11/2015Avago Acquires Broadcom Corporation For $37 Billion
Today Avago Technologies announced their acquisition of Broadcom for 17 billion dollars in cash and 20 billion dollars worth of Avago shares. This will leave Broadcom shareholders with 32%...
33 by Brandon Chester on 5/28/2015GlobalFoundries Acquires IBM’s Semiconductor Manufacturing Business; IBM Bows Out
The history of the semiconductor manufacturing business is both a story of great success and great failure. On the one hand semiconductor manufacturing has allowed the creation of devices...
31 by Ryan Smith on 10/20/2014An Introduction to Semiconductor Physics, Technology, and Industry
Learning about semiconductor physics and technology can be a daunting task. While it’s easy enough to understand what a transistor does and some of the terminology thrown around, getting...
77 by Joshua Ho on 10/9/2014