Singapore Institute of Microelectronics (IME) and Japanese Unisantis-Electronics have jointly announced a collaborative research agreement to develop next generation three-dimensional surrounding-gate transistor (SGT). The development will be mainly carried out in Singapore, using state of the art semiconductor facilities in IME (Ref). I did a little googling on SGT and I was surprise to find that the idea of SGT was proposed by Fujio Masuoka’s team 20 years ago (Ref). The idea was never commercialized because it was too far ahead of its time and there was still plenty of room for conventional planar 2D transistor to scale down back then. However, the conventional planar transistor architecture will be soon running out of steam in the next decade as it hits the physical limitations. Therefore, in my opinion, 3D transistor or quasi-3D transistor architectures will be likely to commercialize in the next decade.

The IME-Unisantis SGT project is led none other by the originator of SGT and Unisantis’ Chief Technology Officer Fujio Masuoka. Fujio Masuoka is most famous and remembered for his revolutionary invention of Flash memory in 1980s when he was still working in Toshiba. However, Toshiba did not appreciate the value of his invention and even tried repeatedly to move him to a position where he could do no further research. It was Intel that first commercialized Masuoka’s invention and became the world leader in NOR flash memory (Ref). Toshiba finally conceded and Masuoka left Toshiba in 1994. In 2004, Fujio Masuoka even sued Toshiba for what he considered his rightful cut of its profits on flash. The lawsuit was finally settled out of court after Toshiba agreed to pay 87 million yen to Fujio Masuoka (Ref).

Last week was a relatively quiet week due to US’s thanksgiving week. I was also away with my family to Hong Kong for one-week holiday. However, beneath the disguised quietness, many chip companies are aggressively initiating new product launches for the holiday season. Specifically for the graphic processor industry, NIVIDA has launched GeForce 8800 GT GPU that supports next-generation DirectX 10 games and the latest PCI Express 2.0 bus standard. The GeForce 8800 GT is powered by the new G92 GPU manufactured using TSMC 65nm process. On the other hand, AMD has also rolled out the ATI Radeon HD 3800 GPUs which also support DirectX 10.1 and PCI Express 2.0 in mid Nov. The ATI Radeon HD 3800 chips are currently manufactured using TSMC 55nm CMOS technology (Ref). AMD even bundled the newly launched quad-core Phenom CPUs together with HD 3800 GPU into the Spider PC platform (Ref). The Spider PC platform is believed to be the precursor of AMD integrated CPU/GPU Fusion chip (Ref). Another leading graphics chip leader in the market, Intel, is rumored to acquire NVIDIA in order to counter the AMD Fusion products (Ref).

One of the co-founder of NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang (黃仁勳), has recently done a rare and interesting face-to-face interview with TSMC founder, Morris Chang. The interview session is shown in the following video. It is interesting to observe how close the relationship between Morris and Huang. Their relationship started way back in 1998 when NVIDIA engaged TSMC to manufacture 0.35um GPUs (Ref). I found Huang very inspiring. He was born in 1963 and founded Nivida only at the age of 30 (1993) together with two partners, Curtis Priem, and Chris Malachowsky. Under his leadership as CEO, NVIDIA is one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in history (Ref).