07/24/2008 July 24, 2008 -- The Advanced Energy Consortium, a research consortium managed by the Bureau of Economic Geology at The University of Texas at Austin's Jackson School of Geosciences, has issued a request for proposals (RFP) to develop micro- and nanoscale technology for enhanced reservoir characterization and hydrocarbon detection in conventional oil and gas reservoirs with the ultimate goal of increasing hydrocarbon recovery from known fields.
07/23/2008 Concerns about the next steps in device scaling -- profitability at 32nm and beyond, challenges of double-patterning, worries about chipmakers' commitment to design-tool functionality -- were aired out in a SEMICON West TechXpot discussion.
07/23/2008 July 23, 2008 -- The University of North Carolina, Greensboro (UNCG) and the NC Nanotech Accelerator (NCNA) have joined forces to develop a treatment for cancerous tumors that could reduce the side effects, such as hair loss and nausea, associated with current treatment methods.
07/23/2008 July 23, 2008 -- JPK Instruments, a manufacturer of nanoanalytic instruments, has released its new NanoTrackerT optical tweezers and 3D particle tracking system to deliver live cell imaging at a new level.
07/23/2008 July 23, 2008 -- Asia Pacific Microsystems Inc. (APM) has reached an alliance agreement with semiconductor foundry UMC for 8-inch MEMS wafer fab capacity.
07/22/2008 On Wednesday, July 16, 2008, the editors and publisher of Solid State Technology (SST) and Advanced Packaging Magazine presented the 2008 ACA Awards, in usual impromptu style on the floor at SEMICON West. This was the sixth straight year attendees of SEMICON West were invited to vote on products they saw at the annual trade show.
07/22/2008 John O. Borland, organizer of the West Coast Junction Technology Group Meeting (WCJTG) held the final morning of SEMICON West, talks on camera to discuss the group's latest research, and other presenters provide summaries of their talks.
07/22/2008 The second-generation SUSS MA300, from SUSS MicroTec is a highly automated mask aligner platform for 300-mm and 200-mm wafers. Specifically designed for 3D packaging, it features a dedicated alignment kit for creating 3D interconnects for applications like chip stacking and 3D image sensor packaging. It also targets wafer bumping and wafer level packaging (WLP) applications, but can be used for other technologies where geometries in the range of 5 and 100 µm must be exposed.
07/22/2008 Designed for ultra-thin wafer handling, especially for back-end inspection, the NWL200 Series of wafer loaders from Nikon Instruments is said to be capable of loading wafers as thin as 100 µm. A chuck system to transfer wafers, an optimized arrangement of sensor beams that allow for accurate detection of wafer shape, and an optional edge-chipping detection function that automatically detects wafer cracking reportedly allows macro inspections of all areas.
07/22/2008 ZESTRON DS 100, from Zestron America, is a solvent-based cleaning agent designed to remove flux residues at low temperatures from electronic assemblies, ceramic hybrids, power modules and leadframes in self-regenerative closed-loop cleaning systems. It is particularly suited for applications when rinsing with water is not permitted.
07/22/2008 The HiRes Generation THRU-Scan from Sonoscan, was developed to significantly enhance through-transmission imaging with Sonoscan's C-SAM line of acoustic microscopes. Reflection-mode acoustic imaging (the most frequently used mode) is limited to a defined depth within a sample, but THRU-Scan images the whole thickness in one scan.
07/22/2008 With the Magellan XHR SEM, FEI Company has launched a class of instruments called extreme high-resolution scanning electron microscopes that allow scientists and engineers to view 3D surface images at different angles and at resolutions below one nanometer. The Magellan XHR SEM images samples at very low beam energies, avoiding distortions otherwise caused by the beam penetrating into the material below.
07/22/2008 July 22, 2008 -- Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California at Berkeley have performed the first scanning tunneling spectroscopy of graphene flakes equipped with a "gate" electrode.
07/22/2008 July 22, 2008 -- Marking a major milestone with the first commercial use of its breakthrough ultracapacitor nanotechnology, Enable IPC Corp., an intellectual property commercialization company, has partnered with the Madrid, Spain-based IMDE Energy Institute to jointly develop ultracapacitors based on Enable IPC's patent-pending energy technology.
07/22/2008 There is a lot that can still be done to improve the efficiency of today's 300mm factories, and an early move to 450mm would only carry those inefficiencies forward another generation. That was the main message in an interview with Gerald Goff, principle member of technical staff for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in Austin, TX, during last week's SEMICON West.
07/21/2008 Hermes, the Eurpoean consortia for the development and industrialization of embedded die technology, has partnered with Flip Chip International (FCI) to leverage the company's proprietary embeddable die customization (EDC) technology to enable the consortium's pursuit of heterogeneous systems integration.
07/21/2008 By Christian Pichler, Datacon Technology GmbH
Originally targeted to high-end applications, flip chip assembly technology is rapidly finding its way into low-end applications for high-volume products with multiple chips, due to cheaper substrates and cost-effective bumping. This requires high speed and precision, which can be achieved cost-effectively by processing directly from the wafer using tried-and-tested, high-throughput flip-chip bonder platforms.
