I have captured some of the highlights of 2008 Symposium on VLSI Technology here: Continuously driving incremental performance improvement in planar CMOS transistor performance is always one of the themes in VLSI Technology Symposium. This year, a number of companies have reported such efforts. For example, Toshiba reported that F and N co-implant at the halo [...]

The Siltronic Samsung Wafer, a $1 billion joint venture between Samsung Electronics and Germany’s Siltronic, was officially opened last week by Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. This is one of the largest 300mm silicon wafers plant in the world. The plant, located at Tampines high tech park, will gear into high volume production in [...]

Imagine the ability to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put yourself in the driver’s seat in a race scene, use your PC to simulate extremely complicated protein folding to help find a cure for debilitating diseases, produce movie-grade blockbuster animation films like “Finding Nemo” and “Kung Fu Panda” in your own PC [...]

A new dedicated MRAM company has been formed- Freescale Semiconductor, one of early champions in MRAM technology, has decided to spin off its MRAM unit (Ref). The new company will be called Everspin and even has a website already. Everspin will focus on standalone and embedded products based on the Freescale’s proprietary MRAM technology. [...]

Taiwan Computex, held from 3 to 7 June 2008 in Taiwan World Trade Center, is now the largest IT show in Asia, and the second largest IT show in the world after Germany’s CeBIT. This year Computex is particularly exciting as major computer chip companies are all rev up for the emergence of Mobile [...]

AMD has launched a new initiative ‘Changing the Game’ yesterday. To be frank, I was a bit baffled at first by the title of the initiative. Console gaming like Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Wii, as well as PC and video gaming have been around for years, so what is the hype to change gaming? After reading [...]

A yield prediction model is used to estimate the yield for a given die area. Traditionally, Poisson’s model is the most dominant model used by most fabs. Recently, I came across some fabs exactly used Murphy’s model instead of Poisson’s model. What is Murphy’s yield model? I have not heard of this yield model before. [...]

The next time you touch carbon nanotube, beware!! Recent scientific studies showed that carbon nanotube can be cancerous!! Carbon nanotube has generated a lot of hype in recent years. For example last year, UC Berkeley scientists have demonstrated the world’s smallest raido using single carbon nanotubes. A group of scientists led by Professor Kenneth Donaldson [...]

The world’s largest semiconductor metrology and yield management company, KLA-Tencor, has announced that it will setup its first Asian high precision manufacturing plant in Singapore. The reasons for picking Singapore are primary due to the island’s strong precision engineering and semiconductor industries. Around 70% of the KLA-Tencor’s customers are located in Asia. Setting up a [...]