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Category: Silicon
New dimensions, new defects and new solutions
With new smaller dimensions we will see new types of faults. In the FinFet, defects within the cells must be examined. It may not be enough to do this only with at speed tests.
FinFET – Image from wikimedia
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Synopsys has presented a new method of Slack-based Transition Testing where they use the timing information from their STA tool (PrimeTime) when generating vectors with their ATPG-tool (TetraMAX).
GlobalFoundries and IBM confirmed
The rumor was true. GlobalFoundries takes over IBM’s chip business and gets paid $1.5 billion. IBM press release.
GlobalFoundries takes over IBM’s semiconductor division
Big semiconductor news (if it is true). GlobalFoundries “buys” IBM’s semiconductor division and gets $1.5 Billion.
Manufacturing in space
ACME Advanced Materials Inc. is a company (probably the first) who is manufacturing commercial products in space. They buy low quality wafers and send them into space (suborbital) where they perform a healing process. Then they sell the wafers for a higher price. At least that is the idea.
Maybe in the future, more of the manufacturing processes should be made in microgravity to improve the quality of the wafers. Maybe even chip manufacturing can be improved by reducing the number of defects if moved to space. At least there are no quakes like there are in Taiwan.
In the future, raw materials for manufacturing may be found in space. Planetary Resources, Inc is already talking about mining asteroids.
Asteroid Mining – Image from NASA – Public Domain
Back to ACME Advanced Materials. Can any customers confirm that their process works? Do they even have a web-page? Are they just fishing for investors now? I found them on Twitter, but that is a new account with poor graphics.