Category Archives: Device Architecture

Intel Corporation this week recognized 26 companies with its 2015 Preferred Quality Supplier (PQS) award, which celebrates exceptional performance and continuous pursuit of excellence. The 2015 recipients exhibited extraordinary achievements across key focus areas of quality, cost, availability, technology, customer service, labor and ethics systems, and environmental sustainability.

Along with the distinguished PQS award, Intel recognized one supplier with the Supplier Achievement Award, which is a specific recognition for outstanding accomplishments in one or more key performance areas. The company also presented eight companies with its highest honor, the Supplier Continuous Quality Improvement (SCQI) award.

Award winners will be honored in a ceremony last night in Santa Clara, California. The theme of the ceremony is “Delivering the Future Together” as this dedicated group of suppliers has helped Intel push the boundaries of smart and connected technology and brings innovative products to market quickly.

“Intel is honored to recognize our Preferred Quality Suppliers for their sustained excellence in 2015 to deliver leading-edge technology with world-class cost, velocity and sustainability,” said Robert Bruck, corporate vice president and general manager of Global Supply Management at Intel. “Close collaboration and superb execution by these suppliers remains one of the crucial factors in enabling Intel to extend our industry-leading silicon, packaging and test technologies, and is a clear demonstration of leadership in their respective markets.”

“The winners of the Preferred Quality Supplier and Achievement Award are an integral part of Intel’s success,” added Jacklyn Sturm, vice president, Technology and Manufacturing Group and general manager of Global Supply Management at Intel. “The absolute focus and rigorous attention to continuous improvement and time-to-market innovation are a testament to their world-class support, providing Intel with a critical part of the foundation to be a leader in computing innovations.”

The PQS award is part of Intel’s Supplier Continuous Quality Improvement (SCQI) program, which encourages suppliers to innovate and continually improve. To qualify for PQS status, suppliers must exceed high expectations and uncompromising performance goals while scoring at least 80 percent on an integrated report card that assesses performance throughout the year. Suppliers must also achieve 80 percent or greater on a challenging continuous improvement plan and demonstrate solid quality and business systems.

Additional information about the SCQI program is available at www.intel.com/go/quality.

The PQS winners provide Intel with the following products or services:

  • Amkor Technology Inc.: semiconductor advanced packaging design, assembly and test services
  • ASM International: front-end equipment supplier for atomic layer deposit (ALD), plasma-enhanced ALD, metal gate and diffusion
  • Daewon Semiconductor Packaging Industrial Co. Ltd.: plastic injection molded tray (PIMT) media for bare die automation, substrate transport, device assembly and test, final shipping and storage, bare die tape and reel (BDTR) media for bare die transport
  • Daifuku: automated material handling systems
  • DISCO Corporation: precision cutting, grinding and polishing machines
  • EBARA Corporation: chemical mechanical polishers, plating systems, and dry vacuum pumps and abatement systems
  • Edwards Vacuum LLC: vacuum system products and abatement solutions
  • Fujimi Corporation: chemical mechanical planarization and silicon polishing slurries
  • Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation: dry etching, ashing, metrology and advanced packaging systems
  • Hitachi Kokusai Electric Inc.: batch processing and single wafer processing systems
  • JLL: facilities management
  • KLA-Tencor Corporation: process control and yield management solutions
  • Lam Research Corporation: fab capital equipment
  • Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company Inc.: high-purity peroxide and custom back-end cleans
  • ModusLink Global Solutions Inc.: channel box CPU for Penang, Shanghai and Miami, and finished goods warehouse distribution for Miami
  • Murata Machinery Ltd.: automated material handling systems, hoist vehicles and stockers
  • The PEER Group Inc.: automation software and services
  • SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions Co. Ltd.: wafer cleaning and anneal equipment and services for semiconductor manufacturing
  • Shin Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd: silicon wafers, advanced photoresists, photomask blanks, and thermal conductive materials.
  • Shinko Electric Industries Co. Ltd.: plastic laminated packages and heat spreaders
  • Siltronic AG: polished and epitaxial silicon wafers
  • Tokyo Ohka Kogyo Co. Ltd: high-purity photo resists, developers, cleaning solutions and supporting chemistries
  • Tosoh SMD, Inc.: sputtering targets
  • Tosoh Quartz Inc.: quartzware for semiconductor wafer processing equipment
  • VWR: products, services and solutions to laboratory and production facilities
  • Veolia North America: waste management services

The Supplier Achievement Award winner is:

  • Nanium: outsourced semiconductor packaging, assembly and test provider (recognizing extraordinary results in product availability)

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation and Crossbar, Inc. jointly announced today that they had signed a strategic partnership agreement on non-volatile RRAM development and production.

As part of the partnership, SMIC and Crossbar have signed an agreement to provide RRAM blocks based onSMIC’ 40nm CMOS manufacturing process. This will enable customers to integrate low latency, very high performance and low power embedded RRAM memory blocks into MCUs and SoCs, targeting the Internet of Things, wearable and tablet computers, consumer, industrial and automotive electronics markets.

“Crossbar continues to execute on schedule, and is now entering the licensing phase. We are honored to announce the collaboration with SMIC as a major stepping stone towards the commercialization of our RRAM technology,” said George Minassian, CEO and co-founder of Crossbar. “Designers of highly integrated MCUs and SoCs need non-volatile memory technologies that are easy to integrate into their products and can be manufactured using standard CMOS logic processes. Crossbar RRAM technology and SMIC manufacturing expertise are creating a new era of unique memory architectures with tighter security, lower power consumption while providing more capacity and fast access time.”

Crossbar RRAM’s CMOS compatibility and scalability to small process geometries enables the integration of non-volatile memory blocks at the same process nodes of MCUs and SoCs.  RRAM cells are integrated in standard CMOS processes between two metal lines of standard CMOS wafers. This enables extremely integrated solutions with on-chip non-volatile memory, processing cores, analog and RF combined on a single die.

“Based on SMIC’s 40nm process node, wecanoffer high-capacity and low-power memory technology with unique security features for smartcards and various IoT devices to customers.” said Dr. Tzu-Yin Chiu, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director of SMIC. “We’re delighted to have Crossbar as a new partner in our stable and reliable 40nm technology platform. We are able to support global customers with competitive technology and help them shorten time to market. We’ll continue to attach great importance to long-term strategic cooperation with more world-leading companies to better serve the market and achieve win-win situation in the future.”

Crossbar’s RRAM provides a cost-effective integrated memory solution for embedded applications requiring low power, high performance non-volatile code execution and data storage.

Multitest successfully introduced a contacting solution for testing of extremely high frequency semiconductors in high volume production. The Multitest mmWave Contactor offers field proven electrical performance while maintaining best mechanical characteristics.

Multitest developed a revolutionary hybrid contacting solution that combines traditional spring probe architecture for low frequency and power I/O’s while incorporating a cantilever solution for the peripheral high frequency transceiver I/O’s. By combining spring probe and cantilever technologies Multitest has extended the reach of volume production contactors to the extremely high frequencies ranges needed by automotive radar, WiGig, and 5G backhaul devices.

Keeping the interface from test equipment to the device as short as possible while minimizing the number of transitions is how Multitest is able to minimize the loss and maintain broadband performance from DC to 81GHz (<-10dB return loss and 4dB to 6dB insertion loss typical at 81GHz).

The mmWave contactor addresses the mechanical requirements of high volume production by incorporating high compliance, robust spring probes and materials and onsite replacement compatibility. The contactor assembly can be fully serviced onsite without incurring delays due to shipping lead times or RMA queues. The entire contacting solution is mechanically assembled and each component can be removed and replaced on site.

The mmWave contactor solution from Xcerra is a field proven solution for high volume semiconductor test that has overcome the challenge of using of metal transmission lines for extremely high frequency applications..

Jason Mroczkowski, Director RF Product Development and Marketing explains: “With the advent of production volumes of extremely high frequency semiconductors, it begs the question, ‘How will you test it?’. The experts at Multitest have considered  all factors ranging from impedance discontinuities to stackup tolerances and their impact on RF performance at mmWave frequencies.  Xcerra is the only supplier offering a complete test cell solution for volume production of automotive radar devices up to 81GHz. This test cell includes the tester, handler, and interface components required for a true high volume production test of mmWave devices.  A critical component of this hardware is the Multitest mmWave Contactor. To date there are many lab and low volume solutions for extremely high frequency semiconductor test, but none exist for true high volume production test of mmWave devices. Until now.”

Think small


March 9, 2016

A single human hair, barely visible to the naked eye, is about 100 microns in diameter.

That’s huge compared to the device components students build in the Microfabrication Laboratory course at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS).Under the instruction of Evelyn Hu, Tarr-Coyne Professor of Applied Physics and of Electrical Engineering, and Peter Stark, Visiting Associate Professor in Engineering Sciences, students are learning the “tricks of the trade” that could enable them to eventually form structures 1,000 times smaller than a strand of hair.

Using a specially designed “teaching clean room” that opened in the SEAS Active Learning Labs last spring, students fabricate electronic and photonic devices, such as light-emitting diodes, by developing components that are so small they must be crafted and analyzed with the help of a microscope.

Nabiha Saklayen, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in physics, completes a photolithography workshop in the SEAS teaching clean room. (Photo by Adam Zewe/SEAS Communications.)

Nabiha Saklayen, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in physics, completes a photolithography workshop in the SEAS teaching clean room. (Photo by Adam Zewe/SEAS Communications.)

Microfabrication involves crafting electronic devices in an unusual way: by printing them onto a material, like silicon. The concept of printed integrated circuits led to a Nobel Prize in physics for electrical engineer Jack Kilby in 2000, and also gave rise to the sophistication and complexity of today’s microprocessors, which can contain more than a billion transistors.

“In order to get a billion transistors into an area that is only an inch or so on a side, obviously you can’t just put the pieces together with your hands,” Hu said. “That set of really intricate techniques is what this course is all about.”

As in printing, shrinking the “font size” allows a tremendously greater amount of information to be represented on the same size page. The economic consequences are enormous, although balanced by the challenges of creating ever-smaller components, Hu explained.

The SEAS teaching clean room provides a first introduction to these techniques, and experience working at larger dimensions with building-block processes and devices. During one afternoon session, students completed a workshop on photolithography, which is a method for transferring a pattern to a substrate. Working at the micron level, they utilized chemicals and UV light to create a metal structure in a grid pattern. They will use this structure in a subsequent lab to measure the flow of electrons.

The course also enables students to work in Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS), a shared-used core facility that holds a world-class nanofabrication laboratory. Students benefit from the expertise of CNS staff and the guidance of teaching fellows Sarah Schlotter and Laura Adams.

“The students concentrate not only on the fabrication of small devices, which is the main goal of the course, but also how to extract fundamental physical properties from the devices that they fabricate,” said Adams. “Since the course attracts a wide range of concentrators, we like to engage the students at all levels and disciplines to have a really collaborative experimental class.”

For electrical engineering concentrator Samwell Emmanuel, S.B. ’17, it was fascinating to see the tiny pattern take shape.

“We’re used to working with things that we can manipulate with our hands,” he said. “How do you work with something that you can’t even see with the naked eye? That’s what makes this course so interesting to me.”

Nabiha Saklayen, a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in physics, enjoyed the opportunity to learn about the fundamental techniques involved in fabricating the kinds of devices she uses regularly for research.

“We usually buy the devices that we need, so these are techniques that we often don’t think about,” she said. “It is incredible how much goes into actually preparing all these different compounds.”

While Hu doesn’t expect students to leave the course with perfect microfabrication skills, she hopes they develop a deeper appreciation for the inevitable challenges of working at the micron-scale.

“That frustration, and the ability to gain insight and intuition from their failures, is a critical thing for the students in this course. I want them to use the imperfections in their devices as a source of feedback to better understand the process,” she said. “My goal is to open their eyes to a world whose features they can’t see. I hope they learn that these techniques are powerful and that they could give them the capability to solve a problem in a different way.”

The emerging market for silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) power semiconductors is forecast to pass the $1 billion mark in five years, energized by demand from hybrid and electric vehicles, power supplies and photovoltaic (PV) inverters. Worldwide revenue from sales of SiC and GaN power semiconductors is projected to rise to $3.7 billion in 2025, up from just $210 million in 2015, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), a global source of critical information and insight. Market revenue is also expected to rise with double digit growth annually for the next decade.

SiC Schottky diodes have been on the market for more than 10 years, with SiC metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFET), junction-gate field-effect transistors (JFET) and bipolar junction transistors (BJT) appearing in recent years, according to the latest information from the latest IHS SiC & GaN Power Semiconductors Report. SiC MOSFETs are proving very popular among manufacturers, with several companies are already offering them, and more are expected to in the coming year. The introduction of 900 volt (V) SiC MOSFETs, priced to compete with silicon SuperJunction MOSFETs, as well as increased competition among suppliers, forced average prices to fall in 2015.

“Declining prices will spur faster adoption of the technology,” said Richard Eden, senior market analyst for power semiconductor discretes and modules at IHS Technology. “In contrast, GaN power transistors and GaN modules have only just recently appeared in the market. GaN is a wide bandgap material offering similar performance benefits to SiC, but with greater cost-reduction potential. This price and performance advantage is possible, because GaN power devices can be grown on silicon substrates that are larger and less expensive than SiC. Although GaN transistors are now entering the market, the development of GaN Schottky diodes has virtually stopped.”

By 2020, GaN-on-silicon (Si) devices are expected to achieve price parity with — and the same superior performance as — silicon MOSFETs and insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs). When this benchmark is reached, the GaN power market is expected to surpass $600 million in 2025. In contrast, the more established SiC power market — mainly consisting of SiC power modules — will hit $3 billion in the same time period.

By 2025, SiC MOSFETs are forecast to generate revenue exceeding $300 million, almost catching Schottky diodes to become the second best-selling SiC discrete power device type. Meanwhile, SiC JFETs and SiC BJTs are each forecast to generate much less revenue than SiC MOSFETs, despite achieving good reliability, price and performance. “While end users now strongly prefer normally-off SiC MOSFETs, so SiC JFETs and BJTs look likely to remain specialized, niche products,” Eden said; “however, the largest revenues are expected to come from hybrid and full SiC power modules.”

Hybrid SiC power modules, combining Si IGBTs and SIC diodes, are estimated to have generated approximately $38 million in sales in 2015 and full SiC power modules are only two or three years behind in the ramp-up cycle. Each module type is forecast to achieve over $1 billion in revenue by 2025.

The IHS SiC & GaN Power Semiconductors Report is based on more than 50 semiconductor supply chain and potential end-user interviews. It provides detailed global analysis of this fast-moving market and explains growth drivers and likely adoption rates in major application sectors.

A team of physicists from the University of California, San Diego and The University of Manchester is creating tailor-made materials for cutting-edge research and perhaps a new generation of optoelectronic devices. The materials make it easier for the researchers to manipulate excitons, which are pairs of an electron and an electron hole bound to each other by an electrostatic force.

Excitons are created when a laser is shone onto a semiconductor device. They can transport energy without transporting net electric charge. Inside the device the excitons interact with each other and their surroundings, and then convert back into light. This makes them attractive for new technology. Inside the device the excitons interact with each other and their surroundings, and then convert back into light that can be detected by extremely sensitive charge-coupled device (CCD) cameras.

Most of the team’s previous work involved structures based on gallium arsenide (GaAs), which is a material commonly used throughout the semiconductor industry. Unfortunately, the devices they’ve developed come with a fundamental limitation: They require cryogenic temperatures (below 100 K) — ruling out any commercial applications.

So the team made a radical material change to bring their excitonic devices up to room temperature. They report their results in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing.

“Our previous structures were built from thin layers of GaAs deposited on top of a substrate with a particular layer thickness and sequence to ensure the specific properties we wanted,” said Erica Calman, lead author and a graduate student in the Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego.

To make the new devices the physicists turned to new structures built from a specially designed set of ultrathin layers of materials — molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) — each a single atom thick.

These structures are produced via the famous “Scotch tape” or mechanical exfoliation method developed by the group of Andre Geim, a physicist awarded a Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 for his groundbreaking work regarding the two-dimensional material graphene.

“Our specially designed structures help keep excitons bound more tightly together so that they can survive at room temperature — where GaAs excitons are torn apart,” explains Calman.

Impressively, excitons can form a special quantum state known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. This state occurs within superfluids and enables currents of particles without losses. The team discovered a similar exciton phenomenon at cold temperatures with GaAs materials.

“The results of our work suggest that we may be able to make new structures work all the way up to room temperature,” said Calman. “We set out to prove that we could control the emission of neutral and charged excitations by voltage, temperature, and laser power … and demonstrated just that.”

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation, a provider of smart connectivity solutions, announced on Friday that Joe Bedewi, corporate vice president and chief financial officer, will leave the company effective April 2, 2016.

As part of this transition, Max Downing, Lattice’s vice president of Finance, has been named interim chief financial officer.

According to the company, a formal search for a successor chief financial officer has commenced.

Also, it expects to have a seamless transition, with Downing serving as acting CFO, given his roles as Lattice’s VP of Finance and corporate controller since July 2012.

Lattice Semiconductor provides intellectual property and low-power, small form-factor devices that enable customers to quickly deliver innovative and differentiated cost and power efficient products.

Total yearly semiconductor unit shipments (integrated circuits and opto-sensor-discrete, or O-S-D, devices) are forecast to continue their upward march and are now expected to top one trillion units for the first time in 2018, according to data presented in IC Insights’ recently released 2016 edition of The McClean Report—A Complete Analysis and Forecast of the Integrated Circuit Industry, and its soon to be released 2016 O-S-D Report—A Market Analysis and Forecast for the Optoelectronics, Sensors/Actuators, and Discretes. Semiconductor shipments in excess of one trillion units are forecast to be the new normal beginning in 2018. Figure 1 shows that semiconductor unit shipments are forecast to climb to 1,022.5 billion devices in 2018 from 32.6 billion in 1978, which amounts to average annual growth of 9.0% over the 40 year period and demonstrates how increasingly dependent on semiconductors the world has become.

The largest annual increase in semiconductor unit growth during the timespan shown was 34% in 1984; the biggest decline was 19% in 2001 following the dot-com bust. The global financial meltdown and ensuing recession caused semiconductor shipments to fall in both 2008 and 2009, the only time the industry has experienced consecutive years in which unit shipments declined. Semiconductor unit growth then surged 25% in 2010, the second-highest growth rate since 1978.

Figure 1

Figure 1

The percentage split of IC and O-S-D devices within total semiconductor units has remained fairly steady despite advances in integrated circuit technology and the blending of functions to reduce chip count within systems. In 1980, O-S-D devices accounted for 78% of semiconductor units and ICs represented 22%. Thirty-five years later in 2015, O-S-D devices accounted for 72% of total semiconductor units, compared to 28% for ICs (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Figure 2

From one year to the next year—and usually depending on the must-have electronic system or product in the market at the time—different semiconductor products emerge to experience the strongest unit shipment growth. Figure 3 shows IC Insights’ forecast of the O-S-D and IC product categories with largest unit growth rates forecast for 2016. Semiconductors showing the strongest unit growth are essential building-block components in smartphones, new automotive electronics systems, and within systems that are helping to build out of Internet of Things. More about these semiconductor products and end-use applications are included in IC Insights’ McClean Report and O-S-D Report.

Use your computer without the need to start it up: a new type of magnetic memory makes it possible. This “MRAM” is faster, more efficient and robust than other kinds of data storage. However, switching bits still requires too much electrical power to make large-scale application practicable. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) have discovered a smart way of solving this problem by using a “bending current.” They publish their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

This image shows the experimental chip the researchers used for their measurements. Credit: Arno van den Brink / Eindhoven University of Technology

This image shows the experimental chip the researchers used for their measurements. Credit: Arno van den Brink / Eindhoven University of Technology

MRAM (Magnetic Random Access Memory) stores data by making smart use of the “spin” of electrons, a kind of internal compass of the particles. Since magnetism is used instead of an electrical charge, the memory is permanent, even when there is a power failure, and so the computer no longer has to be started up. These magnetic memories also use much less power, which means that mobile phones, for example, can run longer on a battery.

Flipover

In a MRAM bits are projected by the direction of the spin of the electrons in a piece of magnetic material: for example, upwards for a “1” and downwards for a “0”. The storage of data occurs by flipping the spin of the electrons over to the correct side. Normal practice is to send an electrical current which contains electrons with the required spin direction through the bit. The large quantity of electrical current needed to do this hindered a definitive breakthrough for MRAM, which appeared on the market for the first time in 2006.

Bending current

In Nature Communications a group of TU/e physicists, led by professor Henk Swagten, today publishes a revolutionary method to flip the magnetic bits faster and more energy-efficiently. A current pulse is sent under the bit, which bends the electrons at the correct spin upwards, so through the bit. “It’s a bit like a soccer ball that is kicked with a curve when the right effect is applied,” says Arno van den Brink, TU/e PhD student and the first author of the article.

Frozen

The new memory is really fast but it needs something extra to make the flipping reliable. Earlier attempts to do this required a magnetic field but that made the method expensive and inefficient. The researchers have solved this problem by applying a special anti-ferromagnetic material on top of the bits. This enables the requisite magnetic field to be frozen, as it were, energy-efficient and low cost. “This could be the decisive nudge in the right direction for superfast MRAM in the near future,” according to Van den Brink.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES, a provider of advanced semiconductor manufacturing technology, announced today that Alain Mutricy has joined the company as senior vice president of the Product Management Group. In this role, Mutricy is responsible for the company’s leading edge and mainstream technology solutions and go-to-market activities for these differentiated products.

Mutricy succeeds Mike Cadigan, who will transition to a newly created role as senior vice president of global sales and business development.

“Alain is an accomplished senior executive with more than 25 years of experience in the consumer electronics, mobile, and semiconductor industries,” said GLOBALFOUNDRIES CEO Sanjay Jha. “He brings a strong portfolio of successes contributing to growth, profitability, and competitiveness for global product organizations, which will help him build on the strong foundation we have already established in our product management group. I am thrilled to welcome Alain to the GlobalFoundries team.”

Before joining GlobalFoundries, Mutricy was founder and executive adviser at AxINNOVACTION, a consulting firm that promotes action to unlock and accelerate innovation in big organizations, as well as co-founder and CEO of Vuezr, which attempted to revolutionize mobile direct marketing by delivering product visual recognition to consumers’ mobile devices via augmented reality.

From 2007-2012, Mutricy served as senior vice president of portfolio and device product management for mobile devices at Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc., where he led a global team responsible for defining the company’s mobile devices product portfolio strategy and structure. He and his team advanced a strategic focus on Android-based smartphones, which included the widely acclaimed family of DROID by Motorola products. During his tenure at Motorola Mobility, Mutricy was also responsible for defining and directing the Mobile Devices business unit’s global strategy for silicon and software platforms, as well as leadership of a global R&D team responsible for designing and implementing integrated circuits, wireless chipset solutions, platform software, product software for non-CDMA products, and an ecosystem strategy for mobile devices.

Prior to joining Motorola in 2007, Mutricy served at Texas Instruments for 18 years, where he was promoted to vice president in January 2002. From 2004 until his departure from Texas Instruments, Mutricy served as vice president and general manager for the company’s Cellular Systems Solutions business. In that role, he was responsible for commercializing and building a leadership position for the company’s wireless chipset solutions for GSM/GPRS/EDGE/3G and OMAP application processors. Prior to leading Cellular Systems Solutions, Mutricy was general manager for the Texas Instruments OMAP business, which he led from start-up status to global leadership between 2000 and 2004. Additionally, from the time he joined Texas Instruments in 1989, Mutricy was promoted through a series of general- management positions, each with increasing scope and responsibility in areas including sales, marketing and general management.

Mutricy holds a master’s degree in engineering from ENSAM and an MBA from HEC Group—both in Paris.