December 6, 2012, Printed Electronics USA, Santa Clara, CA—Toshihide Kamata from the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology updated the efforts on printed electronics in Japan. The organization is a research consortium of the big companies involved in printing, chemicals, and electronics. The focus is on large-area devices, using an ink-based, low-temperature process. Some [...]
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Chan-Long Shieh from CBRITE described the efforts in moving metal oxide TFTs (MOTFT) into production on flexible plastic substrates. The issues in moving a technology from a rigid substrate to a flexible one are not insurmountable, but require much more research. The motivation for the work is to address [...]
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Neil Morrison from Applied Materials described the changes in the industry and their efforts to provide production ready equipment for these new technologies. Although applied has been instrumental in driving transistor dimensions down into the nanometer range, they also are working in the other direction for LCD and PV [...]
March 20, 2012, ISQED, Santa Clara, CA—Venu Menon from TI talked about the special needs for analog designs. Digital designs have long taken for granted the high levels of abstraction and automation available for design, something that the analog world is starting to address. To set the stage, the real world is captured and measured [...]
March 14, 2012, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA — Gary Patton, vice president of semiconductor R & D at IBM, described the world beyond 14 nm. The device and process developments will be hard, as the fundamental limitations of physics come into place. Scaling flattened out about 10 years ago, so the next generations [...]
January 18, 2011, Common Platform Technology Forum, Santa Clara, CA– Mike Muller, CTO at ARM talked about scaling from dimensions of a cubic millimeter to a cubic kilometer. One of the problems with predicting technology changes is that most people get it wrong. An unusual example is someone who got it right. In 1956, and [...]
December 9, 2010, 3-D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging conference, Burlingame, CA—Hans Stork, group vice president and CTO at Applied Materials described the technology landscape for TSVs and the drivers and applications that will use these connections. The baselines for the different unit processes and their integration into a manufacturing flow for TSV last [...]
