Category Archives: Wafer and Foundries

Austria’s ams acquires Heptagon become a worldwide leader in optical sensing

Premstaetten, Austria (24 October 2016) – ams (SIX: AMS), a leading worldwide manufacturer of high performance sensor and analog solutions, has signed an agreement to acquire 100% of the shares in Heptagon, the worldwide leader in high performance optical packaging and micro-optics. With this transaction, ams becomes the

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Number of 300mm Wafer Foundries Increases

Enormous financial and technology hurdles continue to plague the development of 450mm wafers. Ambitious goals to put 450mm wafers to use have been scaled back.  IC manufacturers are instead maximizing their manufacturing efficiency using 300mm and 200mm wafers.  IC Insights’ Global Wafer Capacity 2016-2020 report shows that

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Top Semiconductor Foundries Growth 2015-2016 (per process node)

IC Insights recently released its September Update to the 2016 McClean Report. This Update included Part 2 of an extensive analysis of the IC foundry business.  An excerpt from the September Update, describing foundry sales by feature size, is shown below.
 
The following 2 charts show

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Semiconductor Wafer Mask Costs

Semiconductor lithography and wafer mask set have developed dramatically in recent years. As technology migrated into nanometer geometries mask set price has increased exponentially.
 
The good news is that mask cost is decreasing every year due to maturity in production process and other factors such as market demand, competition

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GLOBALFOUNDRIES Unveils 12nm FD-SOI Process Node

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced a new 12nm FD-SOI semiconductor technology mode, extending its leadership position by offering the industry’s first multi-node FD-SOI roadmap. Building on the success of its 22FDXTM offering, the company’s next-generation 12FDXTM platform is designed to enable the intelligent systems of tomorrow across a range of applications, from mobile

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Semiconductor Foundries Sales Growth 2014-2016

IC Insights released its August Update to the 2016 McClean Report earlier this month.  This Update included an update of the semiconductor industry capital spending forecast, a look at the top-25 semiconductor suppliers for1H16, including a forecast for the full year ranking, and Part 1 of

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