Keeping Ahead of the Curve with Custom ASICs
for more content for automotive, industrial,
IoT and mobile applications are driving this
need for 200mm wafer demand and
production in older technologies. It is great
news for developers of products for the
Industrial IoT. Advanced analog and digital
circuitry to sense and measure from the
large number of sensors can readily be
developed on these mature nodes. These
mature nodes have been well tested in the
past and therefore are fully de-risked. With
the foundries wanting to maximize
fabrication (fab) utilization across all process
nodes, now more than ever these fully
depreciated fabs are offering costs that are
much lower than the bleeding edge
processes. Fab utilization is the total
percentage of the plant and equipment that
is in production use in any given time frame.
Foundries want to maximize this number, as
the machines are running regardless of the
volume throughput and therefore they want
to get the most usage out of them. The
higher the utilization rate, the more volume
that has been processed and therefore the
more stable and reliable the processing
becomes.
Reports by SEMI 9 show that the foundry
market is projected to grow to $97.5 billion
by 2025. The high-volume markets will
continue to push for technological
improvements and be part of the bleeding
edge nodes, thus freeing up the demand on
more mature nodes. When we think about
the bleeding edge technologies of <20nm,
we think of digital circuits and how
optimization at these nodes tends to be
centered
around
the
digital
functionality. That is not to say that there
are not analog circuits at these
nodes. However, it should be noted, that
analog circuits do not always directly benefit
from the effects of scaling like digital circuits
do. And in actual fact, reducing the size of
analog components does not improve
always performance, and having them in
close proximity to noisy digital circuits can
cause interference in the analog
performance 10 . Estimates of process node
usage by SEMI show that over 50% of the
demand will still be for processes greater
than 20nm and also that production is on the
rise at older but cost-effective technology
nodes 11 . So, what does this mean? The drive
9
Dr. Handel Jones, Semiconductor Industry from 2015 to 2025, International Business Strategies (IBS)
www.semi.org/en/node/57416
10
11
https://semiengineering.com/mixed-signal-issues-worse-at-10-7nm
https://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1334312
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March 2019