Month: March 2020

Samsung Admits to Needing EUV for Sub-20nm Nodes

Pretty graphic to draw you in to the blog postAbout a year ago a rumor was circulating that Samsung was unable to yield its sub-20nm products without using EUV for the finer processes.  Since The Memory Guy doesn’t traffic in rumors I did not publish anything about this rumor at the time.

On March 25 the company verified the rumor, though, by issuing a statement that: “Samsung is the first to adopt EUV in DRAM production.”  I found it interesting that the company turned something that  was Continue reading “Samsung Admits to Needing EUV for Sub-20nm Nodes”

COVID-19’s Impact on the Semiconductor Market

DRAM Gigabyte Shipments HistoryToday is March 16, 2020, and the US stock market is still trying to understand what is happening with the global Coronavirus Pandemic, having lost nearly 20% of its value over the past week.  Cooling-off periods (also called “Circuit Breakers”) automatically stopped overheated trading three times today, and numerous other times last week.

Market indexes fell sharply, as is evident in the following chart from Google Finance which shows Continue reading “COVID-19’s Impact on the Semiconductor Market”

NVM Selectors: A Unified Explanation of Threshold Switching

Photo of Ron Neale, Renowned Phase-Change Memory ExpertContributor Ron Neale joins us again to review a paper delivered at last December’s IEDM conference by John Moores & Cambridge Universities, IMEC, and the University of Wuhan.  While the main focus of the paper is on PCM endurance improvements, it also provides some new inputs, which, with some suggested additions of Neale’s own, might now provide a unified explanation of threshold switching in the chalcogenides.  Neale includes discussions of these new ideas with one of the paper’s authors.

One of the most interesting papers at the recent IEDM was presented by a team at: John Moores University Liverpool, and Cambridge University, UK, IMEC, Belgium and the University of Wuhan, China.  As its title makes clear, this research has an important target of Continue reading “NVM Selectors: A Unified Explanation of Threshold Switching”