The evolution of advanced foundry technologies will be crucial to enable the design and manufacture of innovative semiconductors for AI, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles, and smart home applications, said Dr. ES Jung, president and head of Foundry Business at Samsung Electronics, speaking at the 2018 IEEE* International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).
Dr. Jung introduced some of recent research and development in future silicon technology, including MRAM, a non-volatile memory solution embedded in conventional logic process, and 3nm Gate-All-Around (GAA) technology.
Samsung calculates that MRAM will be far more power efficient than conventional technologies, consuming only 0.5% of power compared to SRAM at 1,024Mb. MRAM also has smaller cell area, which allows design flexibility.
Samsung’s unique GAA technology called Multi-Bridge-Channel FET (MBCFET) uses vertically stacked multiple nanosheet channels. With variable width of nanosheet, this technology provides not only optimal performance and power characteristics but also high design flexibility. Furthermore, MBCFET is fabricated using 90% or more of FinFET process with only a few revised masks, allowing easy migration.
Also with one of its newly published papers at 2018 IEDM, Samsung Electronics shared the development progress of 3nm, a successful demonstration of fully functioning high-density SRAM circuit. The development of Samsung’s first process node applying MBCFET technology is on schedule.
