by Ed Korczynski, Senior Technical Editor, Solid State Technology
The first big news to come out of this week’s IEDM in Washington, DC, concerns high-k/metal-gate (HK+MG) transistors for 45nm node and beyond processing, with detailed papers from Intel, IMEC, SEMATECH, and many others (and some late PR by IBM and its Common Platform Alliance partners). Finally, the question of whether Intel uses gate-first or gate-last is answered with a resounding “both” — the company decided that tough integration challenges can be best met with HK first, but MG last.