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July 11, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Bob Johnson, semiconductor manufacturing analyst at Gartner Inc., says there really isn’t any way around it: the equipment industry will recover when the memory makers do. Until then, it is going to be a “Six Flags kind of ride,” the veteran analyst said after Gartner issued a downward revision to its semiconductor capital equipment forecast for this year, predicting a 22.4% contraction.  

What about solar? Johnson said there are only a few semiconductor equipment companies which are “active players” in solar. “Solar is a simple process compared with semiconductors,” he said, adding that photovoltaics “won’t take up the slack” from a downtur...Read More

June 27, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

It now appears that IBM Corp. plans to implement a high-bandwidth silicon-on-insulator (SOI) embedded DRAM (eDRAM) for its server microprocessors at 45 nm, and then introduce high-k/metal gate technology at the 32 nm node.

Gary Patton, vice president of technology development at IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center (Fishkill, N.Y.) said, “We’ve done a lot of prototyping [of high-k] at 45 nm, and we are still assessing high-k for our systems business. For our systems [server] business, the focus at 45 is to get eDRAM into our technology because bandwidth is by far one of the most important technologies.”

May 28, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (1)

The energy crisis presents opportunities to the long chain of the IT industry, and equipment and materials engineers are right in the thick of it. Tom Ortman, a former IBMer who now is president of Concurrent Design Inc. (Austin, Texas) is a good example.

Ortman learned how to layout chip production lines and build custom equipment starting at Big Blue’s Mannassas, Va., fab, and ended up in Austin. His company now employs ~18 engineers who work with clients to develop custom machinery and production lines for medical, clean energy/solar, and semiconductor clients.

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May 23, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Freescale Semiconductor Inc.’s Redistributed Chip Packaging (RCP) technology is an effort that cries out for standards and partners, and Freescale is working the issue.

Navjot Chhabra, RCP operations manager at Freescale, was asked if Freescale’s RCP and the embedded wafer level ball grid array (eWLB) technology from Infineon Technologies AG were both attempting to take advantage of the same opportunities. Freescale and Infineon, Chhabra said, “Have agreed to talk about a common roadmap for this technology. They (Infineon) have a certain space. We are in discussions so we don’t have a competing p...Read More

May 15, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Yoon-Woo Lee, named Wednesday (May 14) to the CEO position at Samsung Electronics Co., brings a lead-by-example attitude to his work and an aggressiveness which could propel Samsung to the top position in the worldwide semiconductor industry.

Lee, 62, first gained prominence as a young engineer in South Korea when he led a Korean team of DRAM designers who were asked to conduct a face-off design contest with a team of American designers who had provided Samsung with its first DRAM designs 30 years ago. At the time, it was seen as a David vs. Goliath contest, with the Americans holding all the cards. With competing designs in hand, the Korean team was deemed the winner (not a surprise in hindsight) and Samsung’s internal memory design teams gained skill and confide...Read More