12/03/2007 December 3, 2007 - A jury has ruled for a permanent injunction against Ultra Clean manufacturing, selling, or importing its Predator gas delivery systems or "colorably similar" products into the US, and must pay rival Celerity royalties for past infringing sales plus interest as well as legal costs.
12/03/2007 Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has approved a proposal to create a nanotechnology institute, which will be named after him, at a facility in Riyadh.
12/03/2007 The new CENTRA 100 transmission electron microscope (TEM) offers resolution to 0.2 nm and is designed for biomedical or clinical laboratory environments. It promises ease of use, fast specimen exchange, and the choice between two imaging modes: high resolution and high contrast.
Productronica, held Nov. 13 to 16 at Neue Messe in Munich, Germany, comes at a great time. Oktoberfest is a fading memory; Christmas celebrations don't begin until December 1; and the last world electronics exposition called Productronica occurred a distant two years ago. The excitement of new product introductions kept full isles and active engineers busy throughout the long four-day event.
12/03/2007 By Jeffrey C. Demmin, contributing editor
"Substrates: The Foundation of Semiconductor Packaging," MEPTEC's final technical symposium of 2007, identified cost and co-design as pivotal issues for the most critical component of semiconductor packaging.
12/01/2007 Apparently, as far as the general media is concerned, anyone with a big mouth and a web site can qualify as an instant expert on biolaboratory safety.
12/01/2007 A government report has resorted to Cold War language and imagery: High-Containment Biosafety Laboratories: Preliminary Observations on the Oversight of the Proliferation of BSL-3 and BSL-4 Laboratories in the United States.
12/01/2007 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Mike Leavitt recently announced a comprehensive initiative by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designed to proactively address the safety of the nation’s food supply.
12/01/2007 Continually scaling circuit features have led to tightened process requirements, including the purity levels of gas and liquid chemicals used in semiconductor manufacturing.
12/01/2007 Air quality is a dominant factor in any clean environment. Fan filter units (FFUs) are often used in “clean zones” because of their ability to be added to existing areas without major refitting.
Semiconductor assembly and test service (SATS) houses, packaging foundries, and integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) are increasingly turning to wafer-level packaging (WLP) to address the demand for miniaturization, lower cost, enhanced functionality, and higher reliability in today's personal digital devices.
11/30/2007 By Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor
The International Symposium on Semiconductor Manufacturing (ISSM), running from Oct. 15-17 in Santa Clara, CA, was full of spirited debate, especially about 450mm, as senior technical editor Debra Vogler reports in her following two articles.
11/30/2007 By Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor
The tradition of the ISMI Manufacturing Symposium as an "in the trenches" conference, by and for the people doing the actual day-to-day work in the fabs, continued Oct. 24-25 in Austin, TX. Particular attention was given to topics on yield improvement/productivity methodologies, ESH, and sustainability. Specific talks included how to fix litho "hot spots," cleaning wafer chucks without DI water or solvents...
11/30/2007 November 30, 2007 - Qimonda says it will reduce its 200mm manufacturing capacities worldwide in an effort to increase work on 300mm activities.
11/30/2007 November 30, 2007 - An appeal conducted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) has reiterated a July ruling that Japan's 27.2% tariffs levied against Korean DRAM chips (targeting Hynix) are illegal.
11/30/2007 PV technology and business expert Charles Gay, former director of the National Renewable Energy Labs in Colorado and currently VP and GM of Applied Materials' solar business group, talks with WaferNEWS about how the PV industry's rapid scaling has spurred innovations in materials science and manufacturing efficiencies.
11/30/2007 Promising more comprehensive nano/micro characterization, Park Systems says its new tool combines AFM, NSOM, Raman, and confocal imaging for the first time ever in a commercial product. And the XE-NSOM/Raman AFM's Z-servo scanner supports true non-contact operation.
The new CENTRA 100 transmission electron microscope (TEM) offers resolution to 0.2 nm and is designed for biomedical or clinical laboratory environments. It promises ease of use, fast specimen exchange, and the choice between two imaging modes: high resolution and high contrast.
Promising more comprehensive nano/micro characterization, Park Systems says its new tool combines AFM, NSOM, Raman, and confocal imaging for the first time ever in a commercial product. And the XE-NSOM/Raman AFM's Z-servo scanner supports true non-contact operation.