07/15/2008 ATMI's exclusive partnership with Intermolecular has now extended further with ATMI's launch of four "High-Productivity Development Centers" in the US and Asia to provide more rapid and efficient methods of integrating new development and manufacturing processes.
07/15/2008 Over in the Intersolar side of this week's festivities in San Francisco, Oerlikon Solar has booked orders from Sunwell for two end-to-end thin-film silicon production lines in Taiwan. Flextronics also will now support Oerlikon's scalability requirements globally.
07/15/2008 Beneath the industry's current schizophrenia -- slump in mainstream IC, growth in PV solar -- there are opportunities to compete and succeed with specific technologies and products tuned to the unique needs of both logic and memory customers, explained Novellus execs in a packed-theater presentation.
07/15/2008 FEI Co. is debuting a new line of SEM tools designed to give researchers a sharper picture of sub-nanometer surface detail than with a SEM. It also is rebundling its technologies to smooth a SEM-to-STEM transition .
07/15/2008 Entegris is introducing new filters this week at SEMICON West to help fight the battle against smaller and more difficult to control contaminants in the fab.
07/15/2008 Urging presidential candidates to make technology policy a top priority, SEMI North America voiced their agenda for Washington at the SEMI Press Conference, held July 14 during SEMICON West. The agenda zeroed in on four critical areas: technology, tax, talent, and trade.
07/14/2008 Setting the tone for the week's events, Stan Myers lead off SEMICON West's opening press conference, presenting the latest trends worldwide, midyear equipment forecast by market segment, and reporting the findings of the SEMI equipment productivity working group's (EPWG).
07/14/2008 Speaking at the SEMInvest forum on Monday, Aviza's CEO Jerry Cutini said that the MEMS and through-silicon-via/3D IC markets are finally starting to buy equipment in production quantities. He said these markets plus ALD represent a billion dollar TAM (total available market) by 2011 for all products, with a compound annual growth rate of ~18%.
07/14/2008 IMEC/ASML's newly 32nm SRAM, partially built with EUV lithography, offers a possible contrast to how Intel is working with the litho technology.
07/14/2008 Asyst CEO John Swenson talks with SST about Asyst's new "Agile Automation" family of technologies, desgined to address the growing complexity required to automate the massive fabs of today and tomorrow.
07/14/2008 IMEC and Qualcomm collaborate on 3D packaging technologies; IPC meets internationally to discuss urgent trends; iNEMI releases recommendations for lead-free alloy alternatives.
07/14/2008 IMEC and ASML give SST an inside scoop on their latest EUV milestone -- functional 32nm SRAM cells (FinFETs) -- and which technology is now under the gun to ensure a production tool is ready as advertised by the end of 2009.
07/14/2008 Prior to Semicon West, Entegris (Chaska, Minn) announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Poco Graphite, Inc., in an all-cash transaction valued at $158 million.
07/14/2008 July 14, 2008 -- A report published in the July 8 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) is the first to describe the principles behind the stability and electronic properties of tiny nanoclusters of metallic gold. The study, which confirms the "divide and protect" bonding structure, resulted from the work of researchers at four universities on two continents.
07/14/2008 July 14, 2008 - Wireless fabless developer Qualcomm has joined European R&D consortium IMEC's industrial affiliation program on 3D integration to understand and develop ways to use 3D wafer-level packaging and 3D stacked ICs in future wireless products.
07/14/2008 European R&D consortium IMEC says it has come up with a method to produce ~50μm thin crystalline silicon wafers for use in solar cells, that uses available tools and is potentially kerf-loss free.
07/12/2008 AMD is warning about a few charges to its latest quarterly results, but they'll be partially offset by the sale of some used chipmaking equipment.
07/12/2008 Ebara reportedly is ramping production of a new exhaust gas treatment system that filters out perfluoride compounds (PFCs) emitted during semiconductor and LCD panel production.
07/12/2008 Numonyx BV, the flash memory joint venture between Intel and STMicroelectronics, have agreed to a foundry deal for Elpida to make its NOR flash memory starting in mid-2009 using 300mm/65nm-45nm process technologies.
07/11/2008 July 11, 2008 -- Silicon Genesis, a provider of process and technology for engineered substrates has successfully produced solar substrates for the PV industry using a "kerf-free" wafering process technology developed by SiGen called PolyMax.
