Category Archives: Device Architecture

ON Semiconductor Corporation (Nasdaq: ON) announced that it is has been named the winner of the Gold Stevie Award for Large Manufacturing Company of the Year in The 15th Annual American Business Awards (ABAs). The ABAs are a business award program in the United States and open to all public and private organizations.

“This award highlights ON Semiconductor’s ability to gain market share and to stay ahead of the industry growth curve,” says Keith Jackson, president and CEO of ON Semiconductor. “In order to succeed in this fast-paced environment, we have scaled both in terms of our technology portfolio and ability to innovate with a solutions-based approach that allows customers to focus efforts on their own core competencies, providing them with faster time to market.”

In 2016, the company shipped more than 55 billion units through its global logistics network and delivered products with greater than 95 percent average on time delivery to requested dates for all key customers.

More than 3,600 nominations from private and public organizations of all sizes were submitted this year.

“Each year the judges find the quality and variety of the nominations to be greater than the year before. The 2017 competition was intense and every organization that has won should be proud,” said Michael Gallagher, president and founder of the Stevie Awards.

Racyics GmbH announced today it has launched makeChip, a design service platform, developed using GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 22FDX process technology and supported by Cadence. Available to start-ups, design experts, research institutes, and universities, makeChip is a central gateway to design integrated circuits based on advanced semiconductor technologies.

The platform provides an IT infrastructure with a full set of EDA tool installations and technology data setup such as PDKs, foundation IP, and complex IP. All tools and design data are linked by Racyics’ silicon-proven design flow and project management system. The turnkey environment enables any makeChip customer to realize complex systems on chips (SoCs) in the most advanced technology nodes.

GF’s 22nm FD-SOI technology, 22FDX, provides advantages in power efficiency and production cost. One key factor to a successful design, leveraging the full potential while achieving shortest time-to-market, is the support of a highly experienced design enablement team.

As a part of GF’s FDXcelerator Partner Program, Racyics  makeChip will provide comprehensive support for the most advanced technologies and thus helps smaller players to realize their enormous innovative potential.

“We want to move start-ups, small and medium sized businesses, and academia to the leading-edge of the game. With makeChip, we enable them to quickly execute analog, mixed-signal and digital designs in GF’s 22FDX technology, so they can develop the hardware basis for high-volume applications in the fields of IoT and Industry 4.0,” stated Holger Eisenreich, CEO of Racyics.

“Our 22FDX technology is quickly becoming a platform of choice for market-focused applications that require low power and operational efficiency with an affordability advantage,” said Alain Mutricy, senior vice president of Product Management at GF. “This collaboration with Racyics and Cadence will help lower the barrier of entry for SMEs, start-ups, and academia.”

Access to makeChip includes a complete digital design flow with advanced silicon-proven solutions from Cadence without additional costs for non-commercial academic projects. For commercial projects, different contract agreements will be applied.

“The Cadence full-flow digital solution, is a perfect match for the makeChip design platform. Users are enabled to meet their power, performance and area targets, “ said Jens Werner, Vice President, Technical Field Operation, at Cadence. “The makeChip platform will help to grow design starts in Europe and beyond.”

Racyics provides its in-house 0.4V IP for 22FDX to makeChip customers. It is free of charge in the frame of non-commercial projects and enables platform users to be the first in the world to explore an ultra-low voltage design space and uses its unparalleled potential for energy-efficient operation.

Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE: 6723, “Renesas Electronics”), a provider of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced that, following the approval of Renesas Electronics’ Board of Directors on May 12, 2017, it will consolidate its subsidiary Renesas System Design, Co., Ltd. (“Renesas System Design”) through an absorption-type merger.

The Merger will be conducted through an absorption-type merger method in which Renesas Electronics will be the surviving company, and Renesas System Design will be dissolved as the absorbed company.

There will be no changes to the company name, business activities, headquarters address, representative, capital, and end of fiscal year of Renesas Electronics as a result of the merger.

Since the Merger involves Renesas Electronics and Renesas Electronics’ consolidated wholly-owned subsidiary, no major impact is anticipated on Renesas Electronics’ consolidated financial results.

In October 2013, Renesas embarked on structural reforms aimed at building a reliable corporate structure capable of generating sustainable profit a stable business foundation. On November 2, 2016 Renesas announced its “mid-term growth strategy.” One element of the strategy was the decision to acquire Intersil Corporation (“Intersil”), which is engaged in the development, manufacturing, sale, and service of analog semiconductor devices. As of February 24, 2017, Renesas completed the acquisition of Intersil.

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq:  SNPS) today announced that its IC Validator was successfully deployed on some of the industry’s largest and most advanced designs to accelerate design rule checking (DRC) closure. Through near-linear distributed processing and efficient resource management, IC Validator delivers industry-leading turnaround time, enabling physical signoff within hours on designs with 10 billion+ transistors. Technology advancements in the latest releases of IC Validator reduce both memory and disk usage requirements by 2x. This significant improvement in resource efficiency enables excellent performance scaling to several hundreds of CPUs by taking advantage of the smaller and more readily available machines in the customers’ existing compute farms.

“Increasing manufacturing complexity at advanced nodes makes it challenging for customers to complete physical signoff within schedule,” said Bijan Kiani, vice president, product marketing, Design Group at Synopsys. “Through high-performance scalability and readily available, optimized runsets from all major foundries, IC Validator is providing our customers with the fastest path to production silicon.”

IC Validator, part of the Synopsys Digital Design Platform, is a comprehensive and highly scalable physical signoff solution including DRC, LVS, programmable electrical rule checks (ERC), dummy fill and DFM enhancement. IC Validator is configured for today’s extremely large designs by enabling 8 CPUs with a single license. It uses both multi-threading and distributed processing over multiple machines to provide near linear scalability benefits that extend to several hundreds of CPUs. IC Validator enables coding at higher levels of abstraction and is architected for scalability to maximize utilization of mainstream hardware, using smart memory-aware load scheduling and balancing technologies.

IC Validator is a companion product to Synopsys IC Compiler™ II In-Design physical signoff. In-Design allows place-and-route engineers to perform independent signoff-quality analysis earlier, before the design is finalized and while correction can be automated. In-Design technology enables new high-productivity functionality within the place-and-route environment, including automatic DRC repair, improved timing quality-of-result with timing-aware metal fill, and rapid ECO validation. In-Design physical signoff eliminates expensive iterations with downstream analysis tools and maintains a convergent design flow to physical signoff.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (“SMIC”; NYSE:  SMI; SEHK: 0981.HK), China’s largest and most advanced semiconductor foundry, today announces the appointment of Dr. Haijun Zhao as CEO replacing Dr. Tzu-Yin Chiu, who will continue to serve as Vice Chairman and Non-Executive Director of the Board and guide the Company’s future strategic direction. In addition, Dr. Chiu will serve as a full-time advisor until June 30, 2017, working closely with Dr. Zhao to ensure a seamless transition of leadership responsibilities.

Dr. Zhao joined SMIC in October 2010 and has moved quickly through the company’s ranks. In April, 2013, he became Executive Vice President, Chief Operating Officer. In July, 2013, he also assumed the role of General Manager of SMNC, SMIC’s joint venture in Beijing. Dr. Zhao received his B.S. and Ph.D. in Electronics Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He has more than 25 years of experience in semiconductor operations and technology development.

Dr. Zhou Zixue, Chairman of the Board said, “We are pleased to have Dr. Zhao, as nominated by Dr. Chiu, as the Company’s new CEO, to lead the Company forward. Also, I want to express my sincere appreciation to Dr. Chiu for his invaluable contributions to the Company. Dr. Chiu, in the past six years, has done an incredible job of turning around the Company, regaining the confidence of our stakeholders, and repositioning the Company as a leading player in the global foundry industry.  Due to personal family reasons, he has decided to step down at this time. SMIC will remain a global, professional and independent company. With the solid management team which Dr. Chiu has already put in place at SMIC, I am fully confident of the Company’s future prospects.”

“It has been an honor to lead the team to transform SMIC over these past years,” said Dr. Tzu-Yin Chiu. “The Board and I are confident that now is the right time to transition leadership responsibility, and Haijun is the right leader for SMIC’s next chapter of growth. Since joining SMIC seven years ago, Haijun has been an invaluable leader and was a part of the executive team which brought about the transformation in these past few years. SMIC benefits from an outstanding management team with a diverse range of experienced leaders and thousands of dedicated employees. I would like to thank the Board and my SMIC colleagues for their support. I will continue to serve the Company as Vice-Chairman and Non-Executive Director on the Board and contribute to its continued growth and success.”

Dr. Haijun Zhao, SMIC CEO said, “I am greatly honored to have the opportunity to lead the SMIC team at this exciting moment in our history. I would like to thank Dr. Chiu for his guidance and mentorship, as well as the Board for their trust. I look forward to working with the Board and the management team as we continue to enhance our competitive position in the foundry markets.  As a global and independent foundry player, we are committed to deliver results benefitting our shareholders, customers and employees.”

IC Insights will release its May Update to the 2017 McClean Report later this month.  This Update includes a discussion of the 1Q17 semiconductor industry market results, an update of the capital spending forecast by company, a review of the IC market by electronic system type, and a look at the top-25 1Q17 semiconductor suppliers (the top-10 1Q17 semiconductor suppliers are covered in this research bulletin).

The top-10 worldwide semiconductor (IC and O S D—optoelectronic, sensor, and discrete) sales ranking for 1Q17 is shown in Figure 1.  It includes four suppliers headquartered in the U.S., two in Europe, two in South Korea, and one each in Singapore and Japan.  In total, the top-10 semiconductor suppliers represented 56% of the 1Q17 worldwide semiconductor market of $99.6 billion (2Q17 is forecast to be the first ever quarterly semiconductor market to exceed $100 billion).

Figure 1

Figure 1

Intel held a slim 4% lead over Samsung for the number one position in 1Q17.  However, as reported in an earlier IC Insights’ Research Bulletin, Samsung is on pace to displace Intel as the world’s largest semiconductor supplier in 2Q17. Memory giants SK Hynix and Micron made the biggest moves in the 1Q17 ranking as compared to the full-year 2016 ranking.  Spurred by the recent surge in the DRAM and NAND flash markets, each company moved up two spots in the top-10 ranking with SK Hynix now occupying the third position and Micron moving up to fourth.

There was one new entrant into the top-10 ranking in 1Q17—Germany-headquartered Infineon.  The company’s 1Q17/1Q16 sales increase was 6%.  Infineon replaced fabless supplier MediaTek, whose 1Q17/1Q16 sales were up by 7% to $1.8 billion but the company suffered a sequential 1Q17/4Q16 sales decline of 17%.  Half of the top-10 companies had sales of at least $4.0 billion in 1Q17.  As shown, it took $1.9 billion in quarterly sales just to make it into the 1Q17 top-10 semiconductor supplier list.

As would be expected, given the possible acquisitions and mergers that could/will occur this year (e.g., Qualcomm/NXP), as well as any new ones that may develop, the top-10 semiconductor ranking is likely to undergo some significant changes over the next few years as the semiconductor industry continues along its path to maturity.

SiFive, the first fabless provider of customized, open-source-enabled semiconductors, today announced it has raised $8.5 million in a Series B round led by Spark Capital with participation from Osage University Partners and existing investor Sutter Hill Ventures. This Series B round brings the total investment in SiFive to $13.5 million. The funding comes as SiFive experiences a growing demand for RISC-V IP and increased interest in custom silicon.

SiFive was founded by the inventors of RISC-V – Krste Asanovic, Yunsup Lee and Andrew Waterman – with a mission to democratize access to custom silicon. In its first six months of availability, more than 1,000 HiFive1 software development boards have been purchased and delivered to developers in over 40 countries. Additionally, the company has engaged with multiple customers across its IP and SoC products, started shipping the industry’s first RISC-V SoC in November 2016 and announced the availability of its Coreplex RISC-V based IP earlier this month.

“At Spark Capital, we believe technology is the great equalizer. SiFive’s singular goal of putting custom chips into the hands of everyone from startups to exploratory design teams to inventors with a healthy crowdfunding campaign resonates with our core values,” said Todd Dagres, general partner at Spark Capital, who will join the SiFive board of directors. “We are excited at the potential for SiFive to enable new and emerging sectors to bring innovative solutions to market that might otherwise never see the light of day.”

RISC-V has developed a strong ecosystem of more than 60 companies including Google, HPE, Microsoft, IBM, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung, Microsemi and others. Member companies, as well as third-party open-source contributors, are actively contributing to a maturing stable of software and toolchains, including GCC and binutils, both of which have been upstreamed. SiFive maintains an easy to install toolchain, SDK and BSPs with binaries of the latest open source tools, including OpenOCD, GNU Debugger, Arduino IDE and the Eclipse integrated development environment. More updates are expected at the 6th RISC-V Workshop this week in Shanghai.

This Series B financing comes amid a string of significant milestones for SiFive in the past year:

  • Product Innovation: SiFive launched its Freedom Everywhere platform – designed for microcontroller, embedded, IoT and wearable applications – and its Freedom Unleashed platform – for machine learning, storage and networking applications – in July 2016. At the 5th RISC-V Workshop in November, SiFive announced general availability of the Freedom Everywhere 310 (FE310) SoC and the HiFive1 software development board.
  • Industry Recognition: SiFive was recognized as the Startup of the Year by the 2016 ACE Awards. Its contributions to the open source community were noted by the Linley Group’s Analyst Choice Awards, which named RISC-V its Technology of the Year for 2016. Additionally, the seminar computer architecture textbook, “Computer Organization and Design,” has been updated to include RISC-V in the latest edition, which was released in April.
  • Customer Adoption: Earlier this month, SiFive launched its Coreplex IP and announced a growing ecosystem of partners, including Faraday, Microsemi and United Design Systems, making SiFive Coreplex IP available to their downstream customers.
  • Company Growth: SiFive’s employee base has grown more than 280 percent to support the development of its Freedom Everywhere and Freedom Unleashed SoCs, as well as the launch of its E31 and E51 Coreplex IPs. SiFive’s leadership team continues to grow with key engineers from Altera, ARM, Atmel, Cadence Design Systems, Cisco, Intel, Juniper, Marvell, Nvidia Qualcomm, Synopsys and Xilinx.

“We are energized by the partnerships we have forged with our investors and their strong belief in SiFive’s mission,” said Jack Kang, vice president of product and business development at SiFive. “This investment will enable our continued growth for years to come, and will allow SiFive to further establish that alternatives really matter in an era where traditional silicon vendors no longer are the most innovative in the industry.”

A team of researchers, led by the University of Minnesota, have discovered a new nano-scale thin film material with the highest-ever conductivity in its class. The new material could lead to smaller, faster, and more powerful electronics, as well as more efficient solar cells.

The discovery is being published today in Nature Communications, an open access journal that publishes high-quality research from all areas of the natural sciences.

Researchers say that what makes this new material so unique is that it has a high conductivity, which helps electronics conduct more electricity and become more powerful. But the material also has a wide bandgap, which means light can easily pass through the material making it optically transparent. In most cases, materials with wide bandgap, usually have either low conductivity or poor transparency.

“The high conductivity and wide bandgap make this an ideal material for making optically transparent conducting films which could be used in a wide variety of electronic devices, including high power electronics, electronic displays, touchscreens and even solar cells in which light needs to pass through the device,” said Bharat Jalan, a University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science professor and the lead researcher on the study.

Currently, most of the transparent conductors in our electronics use a chemical element called indium. The price of indium has generally gone up over the last two decades, which has added to the cost of current display technology. As a result, there has been tremendous effort to find alternative materials that work as well, or even better, than indium-based transparent conductors.

In this study, researchers found a solution. They developed a new transparent conducting thin film using a novel synthesis method, in which they grew a BaSnO3 thin film (a combination of barium, tin and oxygen, called barium stannate), but replaced elemental tin source with a chemical precursor of tin. The chemical precursor of tin has unique, radical properties that enhanced the chemical reactivity and greatly improved the metal oxide formation process. Both barium and tin are significantly cheaper than indium and are abundantly available.

“We were quite surprised at how well this unconventional approach worked the very first time we used the tin chemical precursor,” said University of Minnesota chemical engineering and materials science graduate student Abhinav Prakash, the first author of the paper. “It was a big risk, but it was quite a big breakthrough for us.”

Jalan and Prakash said this new process allowed them to create this material with unprecedented control over thickness, composition, and defect concentration and that this process should be highly suitable for a number of other material systems where the element is hard to oxidize. The new process is also reproducible and scalable.

They further added that it was the structurally superior quality with improved defect concentration that allowed them to discover high conductivity in the material. They said the next step is to continue to reduce the defects at the atomic scale.

“Even though this material has the highest conductivity within the same materials class, there is much room for improvement in addition, to the outstanding potential for discovering new physics if we decrease the defects. That’s our next goal,” Jalan said.

No more error-prone evaporation deposition, drop casting or printing: Scientists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and FSU Jena have developed organic semiconductor nanosheets, which can easily be removed from a growth substrate and placed on other substrates.

Today’s computer processors are composed of billions of transistors. These electronic components normally consist of semiconductor material, insulator, substrate, and electrode. A dream of many scientists is to have each of these elements available as transferable sheets, which would allow them to design new electronic devices simply by stacking.

This has now become a reality for the organic semiconductor material pentacene: Dr. Bert Nickel, a physicist at LMU Munich, and Professor Andrey Turchanin (Friedrich Schiller University Jena), together with their teams, have, for the first time, managed to create mechanically stable pentacene nanosheets.

The researchers describe their method in the journal Advanced Materials. They first cover a small silicon wafer with a thin layer of a water-soluble organic film and deposit pentacene molecules upon it until a layer roughly 50 nanometers thick has formed. The next step is crucial: by irradiation with low-energy electrons, the topmost three to four levels of pentacene molecular layers are crosslinked, forming a “skin” that is only about five nanometers thick. This crosslinked layer stabilizes the entire pentacene film so well that it can be removed as a sheet from a silicon wafer in water and transferred to another surface using ordinary tweezers.

Apart from the ability to transfer them, the new semiconductor nanosheets have other advantages. The new method does not require any potentially interfering solvents, for example. In addition, after deposition, the nanosheet sticks firmly to the electrical contacts by van der Waals forces, resulting in a low contact resistance of the final electronic devices. Last but not least, organic semiconductor nanosheets can now be deposited onto significantly more technologically relevant substrates than hitherto.

Of particular interest is the extremely high mechanical stability of the newly developed pentacene nanosheets, which enables them to be applied as free-standing nanomembranes to perforated substrates with dimensions of tens of micrometers. That is equivalent to spanning a 25-meter pool with plastic wrap. “These virtually freely suspended semiconductors have great potential,” explains Nickel. “They can be accessed from two sides and could be connected through an electrolyte, which would make them ideal as biosensors, for example”. “Another promising application is their implementation in flexible electronics for manufacturing of devices for vital data acquisition or production of displays and solar cells,” Turchanin says.

As electronics become increasingly pervasive in our lives – from smart phones to wearable sensors – so too does the ever rising amount of electronic waste they create. A United Nations Environment Program report found that almost 50 million tons of electronic waste were thrown out in 2017–more than 20 percent higher than waste in 2015.

Troubled by this mounting waste, Stanford engineer Zhenan Bao and her team are rethinking electronics. “In my group, we have been trying to mimic the function of human skin to think about how to develop future electronic devices,” Bao said. She described how skin is stretchable, self-healable and also biodegradable – an attractive list of characteristics for electronics. “We have achieved the first two [flexible and self-healing], so the biodegradability was something we wanted to tackle.”

The team created a flexible electronic device that can easily degrade just by adding a weak acid like vinegar. The results were published May 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

A newly developed flexible, biodegradable semiconductor developed by Stanford engineers shown on a human hair. Credit: Bao Lab

“This is the first example of a semiconductive polymer that can decompose,” said lead author Ting Lei, a postdoctoral fellow working with Bao.

In addition to the polymer – essentially a flexible, conductive plastic – the team developed a degradable electronic circuit and a new biodegradable substrate material for mounting the electrical components. This substrate supports the electrical components, flexing and molding to rough and smooth surfaces alike. When the electronic device is no longer needed, the whole thing can biodegrade into nontoxic components.

Biodegradable bits

Bao, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science and engineering, had previously created a stretchable electrode modeled on human skin. That material could bend and twist in a way that could allow it to interface with the skin or brain, but it couldn’t degrade. That limited its application for implantable devices and – important to Bao – contributed to waste.

Bao said that creating a robust material that is both a good electrical conductor and biodegradable was a challenge, considering traditional polymer chemistry. “We have been trying to think how we can achieve both great electronic property but also have the biodegradability,” Bao said.

Eventually, the team found that by tweaking the chemical structure of the flexible material it would break apart under mild stressors. “We came up with an idea of making these molecules using a special type of chemical linkage that can retain the ability for the electron to smoothly transport along the molecule,” Bao said. “But also this chemical bond is sensitive to weak acid – even weaker than pure vinegar.” The result was a material that could carry an electronic signal but break down without requiring extreme measures.

In addition to the biodegradable polymer, the team developed a new type of electrical component and a substrate material that attaches to the entire electronic component. Electronic components are usually made of gold. But for this device, the researchers crafted components from iron. Bao noted that iron is a very environmentally friendly product and is nontoxic to humans.

The researchers created the substrate, which carries the electronic circuit and the polymer, from cellulose. Cellulose is the same substance that makes up paper. But unlike paper, the team altered cellulose fibers so the “paper” is transparent and flexible, while still breaking down easily. The thin film substrate allows the electronics to be worn on the skin or even implanted inside the body.

From implants to plants

The combination of a biodegradable conductive polymer and substrate makes the electronic device useful in a plethora of settings – from wearable electronics to large-scale environmental surveys with sensor dusts.

“We envision these soft patches that are very thin and conformable to the skin that can measure blood pressure, glucose value, sweat content,” Bao said. A person could wear a specifically designed patch for a day or week, then download the data. According to Bao, this short-term use of disposable electronics seems a perfect fit for a degradable, flexible design.

And it’s not just for skin surveys: the biodegradable substrate, polymers and iron electrodes make the entire component compatible with insertion into the human body. The polymer breaks down to product concentrations much lower than the published acceptable levels found in drinking water. Although the polymer was found to be biocompatible, Bao said that more studies would need to be done before implants are a regular occurrence.

Biodegradable electronics have the potential to go far beyond collecting heart disease and glucose data. These components could be used in places where surveys cover large areas in remote locations. Lei described a research scenario where biodegradable electronics are dropped by airplane over a forest to survey the landscape. “It’s a very large area and very hard for people to spread the sensors,” he said. “Also, if you spread the sensors, it’s very hard to gather them back. You don’t want to contaminate the environment so we need something that can be decomposed.” Instead of plastic littering the forest floor, the sensors would biodegrade away.

As the number of electronics increase, biodegradability will become more important. Lei is excited by their advancements and wants to keep improving performance of biodegradable electronics. “We currently have computers and cell phones and we generate millions and billions of cell phones, and it’s hard to decompose,” he said. “We hope we can develop some materials that can be decomposed so there is less waste.”