Will 14nm Yield?

By SemiWiki

March 27, 2013

If I had a nickel for every time I heard the term “FinFET” at the 2013 SNUG (Synopsys User Group) Conference I could buy a dozen Venti Carmel Frappuccinos at Starbucks (my daughter’s favorite treat). In the keynote, Aart de Geus said FinFET 14 times and posed the question: Will FinFETs Yield at 14nm? So that was my mission, ask everybody I see if FinFETs will yield at 14nm.

 Given that Synopsys owns the TCAD market, Aart certainly knows what is yielding and where. Ever the businessman, Aart then segued into a pitch for the Synopsys Yield Explorer product which is a staple at 20nm. At the Press event following the keynote Aart mentioned lithography challenges and doping. In the hallway Co-CEO Chi-Foon Chan mentioned parasitic extraction challenges and process variation was mentioned multiple times by some of the 3,000 or so attendees. No real consensus could be had because in the words of one conference attendee, “We just don’t know what we don’t know." Hard to argue with that. An Intel person also told me over lunch that yielding 3D transistors at 14nm will be a new challenge, even after successfully yielding at 22nm.

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