Year-to-year sales fall across all regions, decrease 10.6 percent overall The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA)…
Semiconductors
ON Semiconductor reaches key milestones in Roznov facility expansion
New operations site focuses on advancing innovations for industrial, consumer, computing and automotive market segments ON Semiconductor today announces a very important step in the evolution of the company. ON Semiconductor has completed the first of at least two expansions of our facility in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, Czech Republic. Over the past two years, the company has invested roughly 130 million dollars in site expansion projects to expand capacity, enhance…
DRAM market to shrink substantially in 2019
Despite market challenges, Samsung continued to lead in unit shipment volume Recent concerns over market conditions, coupled with a sharp downturn in average selling prices, will lead the DRAM market to reach just $77 billion in 2019 – a 22 percent year-over-year decline. Falling prices and weak demand will likely continue through the third quarter (Q3) of 2019, according to IHS Markit (Nasdaq: INFO). “The recent decision announced by Micron…
Process Watch: Baseline Yield Predicts Baseline Reliability
By David W. Price, Douglas G. Sutherland and Jay Rathert Author’s Note: The Process Watch series explores key concepts about process control—defect inspection, metrology and data analysis—for the semiconductor industry. This article is the second in a five-part series on semiconductors in the automotive industry. In the first article, we introduced some of the challenges involved in the automotive supply chain and showed that the same defects that cause yield…
EV Group partners with NSI on first wafer-level heterogeneous integration of GaAs on silicon
EV Group (EVG), a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment, today announced that it has partnered with Ningbo Semiconductor International Corporation (NSI), a specialty semiconductor foundry based in Ningbo, China, in the development of the industry’s first process technology platform for wafer-level heterogeneous integration of gallium arsenide (GaAs) on silicon for use in RF front-end module (FEM) manufacturing. This marks an important milestone in the development of next-generation, high-performance,…
Intel surpasses Samsung in semiconductor sales revenue in Q4 2018
Samsung maintains number one ranking in semiconductor sales for the total year 2018. The declining market for semiconductors used in mobile handsets and enterprise servers led to a realignment in the company market-share ranking for semiconductor manufacturers. While Samsung led semiconductor sales for the past five quarters, Intel outpaced Samsung in the fourth quarter. Intel’s semiconductor sales revenue reached $18.4 billion in the fourth quarter, compared to $15.8 billion for…
MACOM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES collaborate to scale silicon photonics to hyperscale cloud Data Center and 5G network buildouts
Production scale of 300mm wafers is expected to enable exponential port growth in cloud Data Centers and 5G networks. MACOM Technology Solutions Inc. and GLOBALFOUNDRIES announced a strategic collaboration to ramp MACOM’s innovative Laser Photonic Integrated Circuit (L-PIC™) platform using GF’s current-generation silicon photonics offering, 90WG, to meet Data Center and 5G Telecom industry demands. The collaboration will leverage GF’s 300mm silicon manufacturing process to deliver requisite cost, scale and…
Intel announces tweaks to 22FFL process for RF, MRAM at IEDM18
Part 2 – MRAM in 22FFL The second 22FFL paper at IEDM18 [1] describes the integration of Magnetic Tunnel Junction (MTJ)-based MRAM (magnetic random-access memory) into the back-end of the process. MTJ technology is attractive for embedded non-volatile memory because of relatively low cost compared with e-flash, with comparable endurance and data retention properties. Intel’s MRAM memory cells are built from dual-MgO MTJs, separated by a CoFeB-based free layer in…
Intel announces tweaks to 22FFL process for RF, MRAM at IEDM18
At IEDM last year, Intel gave a half-dozen papers on various topics, including two on their 22FFL SoC process aimed at low power IoT and mobile products. The first (14.1) was an invited presentation on “Intel 22nm FinFET (22FFL) Process Technology for RF and mmWave Applications and Circuit Design Optimization for FinFET Technology”, and the second (18.1) introduced “MRAM as Embedded Non-Volatile Memory Solution for 22FFL FinFET Technology”. I had…
Process Watch: Monitoring for Excursions in Automotive Fabs
By David W. Price, Jay Rathert and Douglas G. Sutherland Author’s Note: The Process Watch series explores key concepts about process control—defect inspection, metrology and data analytics—for the semiconductor industry. This article is the fourth in a series on process control strategies for automotive semiconductor devices. The first three articles1-3 in this series discussed methods that automotive semiconductor manufacturers can use to better meet the challenging quality requirements of their…
