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Semiconductors & Hardware · Sector & topic coverage

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The semiconductor sector, read through primary sources. Every story is grounded in a patent record — logic, memory, packaging, and the IP behind the AI buildout. No hype, just the document.

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24 articles indexed

Semiconductors

A drop of liquid holds the die while the jig lets go

A published application uses the surface tension of an evaporating liquid to hold a chip against a wafer long enough to release the tool, then converts the join to a covalent bond with heat and pressure.

By Lena Foss · Jul 23, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

Doing Two Jobs in One Refresh Window: Micron's Serialized Row-Counter Update

A Micron application published July 16 describes refreshing several DRAM rows at once, then rewriting each row's usage-based-disturbance data one row at a time — because the rows sit in column segments with different repair solutions and share one set of global I/O lines.

By Lena Foss · Jul 21, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

Recess-Based Pick and Place: Aligning a Whole Population of Dies at Once

A published ASML application describes a die-placement machine that parks donor dies in machined pockets, measures both the dies and their targets, then transfers the entire set in a single relative stage move. The engineering target is the alignment step that gates advanced packaging throughput.

By Sam Whitlock · Jul 21, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

Huawei Application Splits the SRAM Bit Cell Across Two Device Layers

US20260206566A1 keeps the PFETs in the front-end-of-line layer and builds the NFETs above them in the back-end-of-line stack, with the two footprints overlapping. It is the only silicon record among 52 Huawei publications that day.

By Lena Foss · Jul 16, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

TSMC Application Confines Anneal Heat to 10 nm of the Wafer Backside

A published application describes implanting source/drain dopants from the back side, then activating them with a sub-400 nm nanosecond laser pulse that never reaches the finished front-side stack.

By Marcus Oyelaran · Jul 16, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

Two Liners, Two Moduli: Taming Stress in Through-Glass Vias

A newly published application describes a stacked double-liner structure that pairs a stiff inorganic film with a softer inner layer to absorb the thermomechanical mismatch between glass cores and their via metal.

By Lena Foss · Jul 9, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

Asymmetric Stacks and Backside Contacts: Inside This Week's GAA Transistor Applications

A large cluster of published applications is directed at gate-all-around transistors built from mismatched NMOS and PMOS stacks and wired from the backside. The disclosed structures target the two limits of nanoribbon logic: making n and p devices each want different things, and getting power to the transistor without stealing frontside routing.

By Marcus Oyelaran · Jul 2, 2026 · Patent record

Semiconductors

A Reduced RISC-V Core Built for Tsetlin Machine Inference at the Edge

An arXiv preprint describes a domain-specific RISC-V processor trimmed for Tsetlin Machine inference, with the authors reporting an average 29.7x reduction in energy consumption versus a baseline RV32IM core.

By Marcus Oyelaran · Jun 18, 2026 · arXiv