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Process Technology articles
Process Technology
Building an automotive chip on a commercial wafer process and then qualifying it to AEC-Q100 is sometimes the only option, but on mature nodes it is usually a false saving. AEC-Q100 shows that sampled parts survived a set of stress tests; it does not make the silicon as robust as a process built for automotive. What you save on wafers you tend to spend again on screening, yield loss, test time and field reliability risk. In the semiconductor w…
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Murugavel Ganesan
December 12, 2025
Video
Five forces will shape technology through 2026: AI staying mainly in the cloud, the move to new transistor structures, HBM4 leading the memory recovery, advanced packaging and photonics tackling heat and bandwidth, and the US and China rivalry splitting the technology supply chain. None of them is a new gadget or app. They come from the places where compute, manufacturing and geopolitics meet. This is an opinion piece written in November 2025. …
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 10, 2025
Technology
A PDK (Process Design Kit) is the package of models, rules, libraries and verification decks that a foundry supplies for one manufacturing process, so that chip designers can simulate, lay out and check a design before it is built. It is the foundry's process described in a form that EDA tools can read. Every chip that reaches silicon, from a smartphone processor to a power converter, was designed against a PDK, which is why it is often call…
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Murugavel Ganesan
September 16, 2025
Semiconductor Manufacturing
Gallium nitride (GaN) is a wide-bandgap III-V compound semiconductor with a bandgap of about 3.4 eV, three times that of silicon. That wide bandgap gives it a breakdown field roughly ten times higher than silicon, and its AlGaN/GaN heterostructure forms a fast, high-density electron channel without doping. Together these let GaN transistors switch faster, at higher voltage and with lower losses than silicon in chargers, power supplies and RF amp…
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Murugavel Ganesan
July 01, 2025
Tutorials
Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a III-V compound semiconductor made from gallium and arsenic. It matters because it does two things silicon does poorly: its electrons move about six times faster, which suits radio-frequency amplifiers and switches, and its direct bandgap lets it emit light efficiently, which suits LEDs, lasers and high-efficiency solar cells. Silicon still wins on cost, wafer size and integration density, so GaAs lives in the parts…
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Murugavel Ganesan
June 24, 2025
Technology
To align product and process roadmaps, a semiconductor startup should pick the process technology for each planned product from what its foundry will actually have qualified at the time of tape-out, not from what is announced. In practice that means fixing market and technical goals first, engaging the foundry early, mapping tape-out and qualification milestones against PDK maturity dates, building in schedule buffers, and designing reusable, …
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Murugavel Ganesan
March 18, 2025
TSMC
Gate-all-around (GAA) transistors wrap the gate fully around stacked silicon channels (nanosheets or ribbons), giving better electrostatic control than FinFETs, whose gate covers only three sides of a fin. That control lets the transistor keep scaling with lower leakage and a tunable drive strength. Both Intel 18A (RibbonFET) and TSMC N2 are built on GAA, so the competition between them is decided less by the transistor type and more by yield, b…
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Murugavel Ganesan
January 07, 2025
Top10
This list, first shared on LinkedIn in November 2024, picks ten cutting-edge semiconductor fabs around the world based on their process technology and production capacity. At the time, TSMC, Samsung and Intel led with fabs running 3 nm to 5 nm class processes for smartphone, PC and AI chips, while GlobalFoundries, UMC, SMIC and others focused on mature and specialty nodes. The figures below are as posted in 2024; some have been corrected or fl…
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Murugavel Ganesan
November 18, 2024
