Category: Semiconductor

Semiconductor/IC

  • KLA-Tencor’s New Reticle Inspector

    Seems like no aspect of IC design and production escapes the need for All Things to Get Harder and Harder, requiring ever-better solutions. Today we…

  • Mentor Unifies Verification

    Seems like verification unification is in the air. We saw it recently with Synopsys, and now we have a move from Mentor. While Synopsys’ version…

  • IC Compiler Reinvented

    What if you could just… toss it all and start over? (OK, maybe all except the router?) If you’re Synopsys, you now know: you’d end…

  • Moving Back to Software

    We’ve seen it before: the debate between hardware and software for implementing electronic functions. An oft-cited approach is to keep as much as possible in…

  • Metal Oxide Resists Lower Roughness

    One of the huge challenges of advanced-node patterning is roughness. There are actually two flavors of this: line-edge roughness (LER) and line-width roughness (LWR). Almost…

  • A Jump in EUV Resist Sensitivity

    There was an interesting presentation that happened towards the end of SPIE Litho – it seemed to catch the audience off guard, and I frankly…

  • EUV Blasts through 100 W

    The EUV barrier has been broken. And I found out right on the heels of yesterday’s EUV update – but too late to get it…

  • Cleaning Up the Verification Shop

    It’s one thing if different tools from different divisions of the same company don’t talk seamlessly together. Generally considered poor form. While that used to…

  • Ban Power Consumption

    “How much power does it consume?” This has been a key question ever since I started work as a product engineer many years ago. Heck,…

  • Wide-Ranging Approaches to Ranging

    As I’ve mentioned before, there are constants at ISSCC (e.g., sessions on image processing and sensors) and then there are the circuits-of-the-month. Ranging seemed to…