Semiconductor supply chain dynamics: Future Horizons @ IEF2011
The last decade heralded a dramatic transformation in supply chain dynamics, driven by the complexity challenge of staying on the More Moore curve. On the demand side, the high cost of fabs persuaded almost all integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) to use foundries for their leading-edge wafer supply.
The ever-increasing process complexity and its negative impact on manufacturing yields forced the adoption of sophisticated foundry-specific design-for manufacturing (DFM) techniques, effectively committing new chip designs to a single foundry and process.
At the same time, the industry adopted a much more cautious lagging rather than leading demand approach to new capacity expansion, resulting in under-supply and shortages in leading-edge wafer fab capacity. To make matters worse, the traditional oxide-based planar transistor started to misbehave at the 130nm node, as manifested by low yields and higher than anticipated power dissipation, especially when the transistors were supposed to be off, with no increase in performance, heralding the introduction of new process techniques (e.g., high-k metal gates).
Even before these structural changes have been fully digested, supply chain dynamics have been further disrupted by the prospective transition to 450mm wafer processing, to extreme ultra violet (EUV) lithography, and from planar to vertical transistor design.
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- NFC wireless interface supporting ISO14443 A and B with EEPROM on SMIC 180nm
- DDR5 MRDIMM PHY and Controller
- RVA23, Multi-cluster, Hypervisor and Android
- HBM4E PHY and controller
- LZ4/Snappy Data Compressor
Related Blogs
- Two Weeks Before Supply Chain Problems Hit
- Is The Supply Chain Getting Windy?
- Apple's Supply Chain
- Where Imagination fits into the automotive supply chain
Latest Blogs
- lowRISC Tackles Post-Quantum Cryptography Challenges through Research Collaborations
- How to Solve the Size, Weight, Power and Cooling Challenge in Radar & Radio Frequency Modulation Classification
- Programmable Hardware Delivers 10,000X Improvement in Verification Speed over Software for Forward Error Correction
- The Integrated Design Challenge: Developing Chip, Software, and System in Unison
- Introducing Mi-V RV32 v4.0 Soft Processor: Enhanced RISC-V Power