Blogs
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Editor's View
Training Technicians, Hudson Valley Style
The chip manufacturing technology sequence at Hudson Valley Community College is an opportunity, but no cakewalk.…
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Semico Spin
Forecasting Wafer Demand: Technology Migration, Bottlenecks and Confetti
If you cover a long enough time period, the small ups and downs of a graphed line can look very smooth.…
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Mentor Musings
Anchors Away - Anchoring and Seeding in Double Pattern Design.
Many aspects of how double patterning (DP) affects the designer depend on the methodology used and the level of control …
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Viewpoints: SEMI
Photomask Market to Hit $3.35 billion in 2013
The merchant photomask industry must balance a shrinking merchant market with escalating development and capital costs.…
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Siliconisms
GlobalFoundries Expands Offerings With Partners
GlobalFoundries R&D with Samsung leads to 28nm fabs in the U.S., Korea, and Germany, and first tape-outs using leadi…
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Litho Guru
Would you buy a book written entirely by a computer? I did, and here is what I found.…
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ASN's All Things SOI
ST-Ericsson 28nm FD-SOI smartphone SOC, Q3 tape-out (interview)
Chief Chip Architect: less process complexity; solves scaling, leakage and variability issues…
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ImPatterning
Incumbency rules! - in lithography as elsewhere.
We were discussing the latest in lithography that were the subject of blogs by yours truly and Chris Mack. I was opining…
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Riding the Silicon Rapids
EUV glass still less than half full, but level is rising
The rate of progress in EUV lithography is better than many perceive it to be. …










Qualcomm, Micron and GlobalFoundries gained ground in the top 20 rankings in terms of sales in the first quarter of 2012, according to IC Insights. GlobalFoundries replaced Elpida in the top 20 rankings. The foundry vendor also jumped ahead of United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC).
The IC business climate continues to improve in 2012, prompting various firms to raise their respective capital spending forecasts. Total semiconductor capital spending is now projected to hit $56.5 billion in 2012, nearly flat from the previous year and almost $6 billion higher than the January outlook, according to a new forecast from VLSI Research Inc.