III. Writing exercises:

Exercise 1. Complete the sentences with the suggested words:

development; industry; today; in; global.

That explains the________ nature of the electronics_________ and underscores the trends we are seeing ________as software _________and design engineering join the manufacturing sector _______chasing opportunities beyond our shores.

Exercise 2. Fill in the table with words and expressions from the text:

	parts	systems	processes
Example: recent events suggest that			epic changes are afoot in the semiconductor industry that may rock the status quo.
that trend will have
Silicon Valley needs
cell phones and PC penetration is

Exercise 3. Compose a story on one of the topics (up to 100 words):

“New Era in Semiconductors”

“Semiconductor Devices ”

“Silicon Valley”

Lesson 4

Read the text: Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor industry, for the most part, has a decades-long and therefore unshakeable belief in Moore's Law, which postulates that integrated circuits will double in complexity at a predictable rate with a concomitant decrease in manufacturing costs. The added benefit is that circuit complexity increases integrated functionality and reliability while reducing size, weight and power consumption. The industry has always believed that its ability to make things faster, cheaper, smaller (and therefore more packed with features) will spur an emerging market.

With the flattening of the industry revenue curve since 1995 (though it peaked massively in the year 2000), the industry has had to face the very real spectre of saturated demand for the computers and cell phones that have been its most recent drivers. The industry has had to face the possibility that, for the first time in its history, its driving markets may not be infinitely elastic.

The industry's technology leaders have reacted predictably to the situation. If demand drops, then reduce the manufacturing costs by increasing complexity: smaller, denser, more capable circuits on larger wafers.

If the leaders succeed in adhering to Moore's exponential, they will distance themselves from the pack. In moving to the next generation of technology, they will have imposed a tremendous financial burden on those with underused installed capacity in previous technology generations.

But it's not yet clear whether they will succeed, and at what cost. "For our industry," Moore himself has said, "many of the exponential trends are approaching limits that require new means for circumvention if we are to continue the historic rate of progress. Business as usual will certainly bump up against barriers in the next decade or so."

In a now-famous keynote speech delivered at the 2003 International Solid-State Circuits Conference, Moore pointed out that "a new and more fundamental barrier must be confronted in the next decade: the fact that materials are made of atoms and technology is approaching atomic limits."

The problems to be solved are many. They fall into two categories: increasing device speeds and controlling leakage currents. The solutions are not very clear. Undaunted, technology leaders are looking for "boosters" that wring incremental performance out of current technologies. Among them are such techniques as "straining" the lattice silicon to improve the mobility of charge carriers, high-k gate dielectrics, metal gate electrodes and fully depleted silicon-on-insulator. Researchers are also exploring a departure from planar structures in the fundamental building blocks of the IC, in the form of multigate devices such as FinFETs.

But will those efforts pay off even as the technological obstacles are scaled? As Moore put it in his ISSCC speech, "The technological challenges continue to escalate, but so do the financial challenges. Clearly, in an industry where revenue growth seems to be slowing down, this represents a formidable obstacle."

Already, the costs of scaling the obstacles are so huge that only the largest of the semiconductor manufacturers can hope to work on them. What about the rest of the industry?

Some companies are resorting to joint R&D and manufacturing efforts. Others are betting that the specialised manufacturing foundries will bail them out. "It used to be that the foundries were a half-step behind the state of the art, but not anymore, " says Wilf Corrigan, founder and chairman of LSI Logic. In fact, the foundries may have an inherent advantage over captive fabs. Foundries can fill their fabs with products from a number of designers. Captive fabs need increasingly scarce high-volume products to make their operations more effective.

On the other hand, the more complex-and hence the more subject to instability-the manufacturing process, the closer its link with the design process must be. A tighter, more iterative integration of design and manufacturing may present new challenges to the foundries, their fabless customers and the EDA industry. "The EDA industry is somewhat behind our requirements. The problem is that they can never agree on standards," says Corrigan.