Tag: logic

Semiconductor spending inches up

Posted on January 14, 2015 by - News

nand-chipsCapital spending by semiconductor companies grew by 12.9 percent last year, but will only grow by 0.8 percent this year.
That’s according to market intelligence company Gartner which said capital spending will generate revenues of $65.7 billion this year.
Bob Johnson, a VP at Gartner, said that equipment spending outstripped capital spending last year and will do the same this year. 2016 will be a different kettle of fish. Manufacturers will exercise caution this year.
This year, chip foundries will outspend logic device manufacturers but there’s a danger of the mobile market being saturated and that will dampen the need for new capacity.
Memory manufacturers are likely to switch their manufacturing from NAND to DRAM because the market is more favourable for the latter than the former. But that will switch net year, because DRAM will be in oversupply.
Demand for solid state drives will mean more capacity shifts during the next three years.

 

Team builds high rise semiconductor

Posted on December 15, 2014 by - News

The image depicts today's single-story electronic circuit cards, where logic and memory chips exist as separate structures, connected by wires. Like city streets, those wires can get jammed with digital traffic going back and forth between logic and memory. On the right, Stanford engineers envision building layers of logic and memory to create skyscraper chips. Data would move up and down on nanoscale "elevators" to avoid traffic jams.Researchers from Stanford said they have successfully demonstrated the ability to build semiconductors that combine logic and memory chips in a “high rise” configuration.

The engineers said they have created a new technology to produce transistors, a new type of memory that is ideal for multiple levels and a different way of building the high rise structures.

Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford professor, claimed the design and fabrication techniques are scalable.  “With further  development this architecture could lead to computing performance that is much, much grater than anything available today,” h said.

Heat generated by silicon chips has been a problem for decades and leakage drains batteries.  The team uses carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and solved the big problem of putting enough of these into a small area to make a useful chip.

The engineers grow CNTs on round quartz wafer and created a metal film allowing them to lift a heap of CNTs off the quartz base and put it into a silicon wafer.

The new type of memory uses titanium nitride, hafnium oxide and platinum to create metal-oxide-metal “sandwich” and use electrical switches to make conductive/resistive zeroes and ones. The researches dub this resistive random access memory (RRAM). It can be made at much lower temperatures than silicon memory.