Breakthrough costs limit semiconductor industry's search for alternative technologies

As the cost and complexity of wafer fabrication continue to improve, this year has been the year in which the semiconductor industry is integrated and looking for alternative technology records. In the day before in the United States of California at the IEEE S3S conference will be held, the engineers not only to acquire more silicon on an insulating cover (SOI), select the new techniques of threshold voltage design and single chip 3D integration, but also has heard about the industrial restructuring and integration of several rumors.
So far this year, the global semiconductor company has completed 23 acquisitions, compared with the total number of transactions over the past two years more, Morgan Stanley (Morgan Stanley) semiconductor Investment Bank global head of Mark Edelstone in his speech revealed. He also predicted that this year's global M & a volume could increase from $17 billion 400 million to nearly $30 billion.
"This year's situation is really a record breaking."!" He cited several major consolidation cases this year, such as Infineon Technologies (Infineon Technologies) and International Rectifier (IR), as well as mergers and acquisitions between Annwa high (Avago) and LSI. "This trend will continue and it is expected to be very busy in the coming years."."
The low cost of capital is creating a wave of mergers and acquisitions for all industries, while the increase in wafer manufacturing costs and complexity contributes to mergers and acquisitions in the semiconductor industry. The manufacture of an 20nm wafer cost about $53 million, compared with the 28nm chip production cost $36 million more substantial increase, is expected to will be another high cost by 16/14nm node, Edelstone said. "To make money in such an investment environment, really need a very large market, but also will have a huge impact on the development of the semiconductor industry.". With the 16/14 nm FinFET generation, the cost of each gate continues to rise, which will significantly change the status quo of the semiconductor industry - the fact that the scale determines success or failure."
A number of speakers at the meeting agreed that the cost of each transistor continued to rise in the industry as a whole. However, Intel (Intel) revealed in September this year that its 14nm FinFET process would support lower cost per transistor.
"14/16nm FinFET process nodes represent the mainstream direction of the industry in the future, but fully depleted (FD) and extremely thin SOI processes also have a chance," says Michael Medicino, product manager at GlobalFoundries.
Some cost sensitive action chips will avoid adopting 14nm and 10nm FinFET processes because of costs, and the time may be between 4 and 6 years. SOI is to provide an alternative solution for it, it can cost up to 28nm polymer transistors, the properties of 20nm bulk crystal, but he believes that all bulk transistor costs will decline further in the market under pressure.
Mendicino expects SOI replacement technology to account for about 10% of the foundry business over the next three years, but he stressed that this is only speculation. "Ask me again in three years."!" He quipped.
In addition, MediaTek (Mediatek) high performance processor technology director Alice Wang introduces a sub threshold design case. The company's broad objective is to drive the chip to minimize the leakage current and the dynamic energy rendezvous, which is also a concept proposed in her doctoral dissertation and the ISSCC 2004 paper.
Engineers have been working on this difficult goal for nearly a year. The next challenge is to provide chips that still do meaningful work, reliability, and minimal overhead, "Alice points out.
Massively parallel architectures contribute to the performance required for ultra low power chips for media processing tasks. In addition, new approaches to timing convergence with new tools can solve some of the reliability and overhead issues, she says.
"I think it's time for ULV to become a part of our everyday life."." "There are about 1 billion 300 million people in the world - 20% of the world's population - and there is no electricity supply," she said of the wearable and design issues in the developing world...... Therefore, energy is the real key challenge for emerging markets."