Destination 30 TB: HDD Vendors Plan Different Routes to Hit Storage Milestone in 2023

In the recent months all three hard drive manufacturers — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — and some of their partners have outlined plans to ship 30TB HDDs already...

24 by Anton Shilov on 6/3/2022

ASML High-NA Development Update: Coming to Fabs in 2024 - 2025

It took the semiconductor industry over a decade to prep everything needed for production of chips using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. It looks like it is going to take...

8 by Anton Shilov on 5/26/2022

Applied Materials Outlines Next-Gen Tools for 3nm and GAA Transistor Era

Last month Samsung Foundry quietly announced that it was set to begin producing chips using its 3GAE (3 nm-class, gate-all-around transistors, early) process technology in the second quarter. While...

17 by Anton Shilov on 5/12/2022

TSMC Roadmap Update: N3E in 2024, N2 in 2026, Major Changes Incoming

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has solid plans for the next few years, but the foundry's manufacturing technology design cycles are getting longer. As a result, to address all of...

21 by Anton Shilov on 4/22/2022

TSMC Unveils N4X Node: Extreme High-Performance at High Voltages

TSMC this week announced a new fabrication process that is tailored specifically for high-performance computing (HPC) products. N4X promises to combine transistor density and design rules of TSMC's N5-family...

42 by Anton Shilov on 12/17/2021

Semi CapEx to Hit $152 Billion in 2021 as Market on Track for $2 Trillion by 2035

Semiconductor makers have drastically increased their capital expenditures (CapEx) this year in response to unprecedented demand for chips that is going to last for years. Now the CEO of...

8 by Anton Shilov on 12/17/2021

Western Digital Spills Beans on HDD Plans: 30TB HDDs Planned, MAMR's Future Unclear

Western Digital this week said that its energy-assisted magnetic recording (ePMR) and OptiNAND technologies coupled with increased number of platters per hard drive would enable it to build HDDs...

41 by Anton Shilov on 12/2/2021

Texas To Get Multiple New Fabs as Samsung and TI to Spend $47 Billion on New Facilities

After a year of searching for the right place of its new U.S. fab, Samsung this week announced that it would build a fab near Taylor, Texas. The company...

135 by Anton Shilov on 11/24/2021

TSMC Roadmap Update: 3nm in Q1 2023, 3nm Enhanced in 2024, 2nm in 2025

TSMC has introduced a brand-new manufacturing technology roughly every two years over the past decade. Yet as the complexity of developing new fabrication processes is compounding, it is getting...

32 by Anton Shilov on 10/18/2021

TSMC to Build Japan's Most Advanced Semiconductor Fab

Fabs are well-known for being an expensive business to be in, so any time a new fab is slated for construction, it tends to be a big deal &ndash...

14 by Anton Shilov on 10/15/2021

China's SMIC To Build a GigaFab for $8.87B: An Answer to the Shortages

As a result of being on the US Entity list, SMIC's blacklisting has caused troubles in the company developing and deploying leading-edge fabrication technologies. As a result, it has...

23 by Anton Shilov on 9/6/2021

Samsung: Deployment of 3nm GAE Node on Track for 2022

Samsung Foundry has made some changes to its plans concerning its 3 nm-class process technologies that use gate-all-around (GAA) transistors, or what Samsung calls its multi-bridge channel field-effect transistors...

32 by Anton Shilov on 7/9/2021

Seagate Signs HAMR Deal with Showa Denko: Secures Second Source for HAMR Platters

Seagate this week signed an agreement with Showa Denko in a bid to secure a second source of platters for its hard drives based on heat assisted magnetic recording...

17 by Anton Shilov on 6/11/2021

TSMC Update: 2nm in Development, 3nm and 4nm on Track for 2022

For TSMC, being the world's largest foundry with nearly 500 customers has its peculiarities. On the one hand, the company can serve almost any client with almost any requirements...

74 by Anton Shilov on 4/26/2021

Sales of Fab Tools Surge to Over $71 Billion in 2020

SEMI, an organization representing chipmakers and producers of semiconductor production tools, published this week that sales of wafer processing equipment has surged to an all-time record of $71.19 billion...

18 by Anton Shilov on 4/15/2021

SK Hynix to Build $106 Billion Fab Cluster: 800,000 Wafer Starts a Month

Capping off a busy week for fab-related news, South Korea authorities this week gave SK Hynix a green light to build a new, 120 trillion won ($106.35 billion) fab...

41 by Anton Shilov on 4/2/2021

TSMC to Spend $100B on Fabs and R&D Over Next Three Years: 2nm, Arizona Fab & More

TSMC this week has announced plans to spend $100 billion on new production facilities as well as R&D over the next three years. The world's largest contract maker of...

45 by Anton Shilov on 4/2/2021

EUV Pellicles Ready For Fabs, Expected to Boost Chip Yields and Sizes

Foundries started limited usage of extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for high-volume manufacturing (HVM) of chips in 2019. At the time, ASML's Twinscan NXE scanners were good enough for production...

35 by Anton Shilov on 3/31/2021

SMIC to Build a New 28nm Fab in Shenzhen: Production to Start in 2022

As further evidence that the ongoing chip crunch is hitting every level of the chip manufacturing chain, Chinese chipmaker SMIC has announced plans to build a new 28nm manufacturing...

12 by Anton Shilov on 3/20/2021

AI Meets Chipmaking: Applied Materials Incorporates AI In Wafer Inspection Process

Advanced system-on-chip designs are extremely complex in terms of transistor count and are hard to build using the latest fabrication processes. In a bid to make production of next-generation...

11 by Anton Shilov on 3/19/2021

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now