SEMICON West 2014 in San Francisco was a great place to meet bloggers in the semiconductor industry to get updated on the status of 450mm diameter silicon wafers. On one side, there is a good news about the unprecedented level of collaboration taking place between the design and construction professionals
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Each year, top foundries are ranked by their sales, and you probably don’t need the table below to know who’s first.
But what if we look at the top foundries from the capacity angle? Each of the top foundries holds several production lines that address different technology nodes and wafer
Maskset cost is becoming one of the major expenses to the overall NRE cost of ASIC projects, particularly with advanced technology nodes. For projects targeting low volume production the maskset cost is a financial barrier to a profitable and solid business.
Taping out using MLM instead of a full maskset
Semiconductor foundries claim they release a new technology node every two years. They may be off by a year or two, but on the whole, this is quite impressive, no doubt. Come to think of it, I don’t believe many of us even change our mobile phone every two years. How
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Two years ago TSMC announced its plans to expand into IC packaging services. It is unclear how much these plans succeeded up till now, but it definitely seems that TSMC is now in an excellent position to take a big bite into the advanced IC packaging market, enter into direct competition
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What is a die per wafer calculator?
A die per wafer calculator is a tool used by chip designers and fabs to estimate how many individual dies (aka chips) can be cut from a single semiconductor wafer.
It’s like trying to fit as many square stickers as possible on