By Mark LaPedus
Gartner says by 2014, 10% to 15% of reviews on social media sites are expected to be fake and paid for by companies.

The 2012 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) is near. At the event, slated for Dec. 10 to 12 in San Francisco, GlobalFoundries CEO Ajit Manocha will give a keynote, entitled: “Is the Fabless/Foundry Model Dead? We Don’t Think So. Long Live Foundry 2.0!” Here are some of the major papers at the event:

• IBM will demonstrate high-performance state-of-the-art CMOS circuits—including SRAM memory and ring oscillators—on a flexible plastic substrate. The extremely-thin silicon-on-insulator (ETSOI) devices have a body thickness of just 60 angstroms.

• A team led by IBM will separately report on the world’s first high-performance hybrid-channel ETSOI CMOS device. Researchers have integrated a PFET having a thin, uniform strained SiGe channel, with an NFET having a Si channel, at 22nm geometries.

• Intel will talk about its 22nm Tri-Gate technology for SoC applications.

• TSMC will describe a heterogeneous epitaxial growth process for finFETs.

• MIT will describe how they achieved the highest nanowire hole mobilities ever reported, in trigate nanowire PFETs. Separately, MIT has begun to investigate a new 2D material, molybdenum sulfide (MoS), which has similar characteristics but offers something graphene doesn’t: a wide energy bandgap.

• Everspin will talk about a highest-density ST-MRAM.

• Macronix has built flash memories that could heal themselves by means of tiny onboard heaters that provide thermal annealing just at the spots where it is needed.

• Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology will detail a high-speed pattern-recognition system comprising of CMOS “neurons” and an array of resistive-RAM (ReRAM)-based “synapses.”

GlobalFoundries took the covers off its new finFET architecture, which it will introduce for the 14nm node next year.

Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography is late for the 10nm node and could possibly miss the window for that insertion point.

Piper Jaffray says Intel is working on a foundry partnership with Cisco, according to reports.

Japan’s Sharp is renegotiating a stake sale to Foxconn. Sharp is also in talks with Intel for a possible capital tie-up, according to reports.

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.12 billion in orders worldwide in August 2012 and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.84, according to SEMI. This compares to an 0.86 ratio in July.

SEMI reported worldwide PV manufacturing equipment billings and bookings for the second quarter of 2012. At 0.33, the book-to-bill ratio stayed below parity for the fifth consecutive quarter.

Solar installations are growing at a fast pace, according to Applied Materials. Applied Materials will highlight its latest products in solar technology at the upcoming 27th European Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition.

Cypress and Ramtron have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Cypress will acquire all the outstanding stock of FRAM maker Ramtron at a price of $3.10 per share in cash.

Mixed-signal foundry vendor LFoundry plans to invest a total of 25 million euros in R&D in its fabs and other projects.

The soaring demand for voice and data traffic is choking the network. Here are some current and futuristic solutions to solve the problems.

The explosion of mobile devices, virtualization and cloud computing is putting a strain on the network, thereby fueling the need for a new technology called software-defined networking (SDN).

For the first time since it entered the industry seven years ago, U.S.-based Micron managed to cross the 20% market share threshold in the NAND flash memory business during the second quarter.

The market for integrated circuits is forecast to post much stronger average annual growth through 2021 compared to the average market growth over the past 15 years, according to an analysis recently completed by IC Insights.

Booming tablet shipments—including the iPad with its 9-inch screen, as well as smaller 7.x-inch models from various brands—will drive a robust 56% annual increase in shipments for the tablet display market in 2012, according to the IHS iSuppli.

Tags: Applied Materials, Cypress, ETSOI, EUV, Everspin, FinFETs, Foxconn, Gartner, GlobalFoundries, Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, IBM, IC Insights, IEDM, IEEE, IHS iSuppli, Intel, LFoundry, Macronix, MIT, PFETs, Piper Jaffray, Ramtron, SEMI, Sharp, SiGe, software-defined networking, ST-MRAM, tablets, TSMC

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