07/01/2007 Fluxes - the brownish, fairly liquid material that allows molten solders to wet onto other metal surfaces - have come a long way from their rather primitive SMT forbears in solder paste, wave soldering, and rework to fulfill diverse needs in the semiconductor market.
07/01/2007 Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) comprise a broad category of packages - sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and more - that attract attention everywhere.
07/01/2007 Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) include a variety of miniaturized intelligent mechanical systems such as accelerometers, flow sensors, motion mirrors, and radio-frequency (RF) devices.
07/01/2007 Greetings from the Constitution State. For my first contribution to this publication - since developments in new packaging technology have failed to keep pace with Moore’s Law - I chose to consider industry consortia’s role in accelerating the rate of advancement in device packaging.
07/01/2007 Advanced packaging is a dynamic sector of the semiconductor device manufacturing realm, as evidenced in the breadth of back-end and final assembly-and-test products on display at this year’s SEMICON West exhibition, held July 16-19 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.
07/01/2007 Concepts from the textile industry may soon infiltrate thermal management in advanced packaging, in the form of manufactured spun threads and felted mats composed of single-wall carbon nanotubes (CNTs).
07/01/2007 For decades, materials developers and formulators have used common, industry-standard measurement tools for assessing a given material’s properties and characteristics to provide some indication of performance.
06/29/2007 June 29, 2007 - KLA-Tencor Corp. apparently has quietly acquired FabSolve LLC, a US firm with "design-based metrology" software, based on its Vietnam parent group's digital mapping/GIS technology, that can be used for in-line metrology in semiconductor manufacturing.
06/29/2007 June 29, 2007 - Kingston and Smart Modular Technologies continued to lead the DRAM module sector in 2006, but other firms shot up the ladder riding success at customers Lenovo and Hewlett-Packard, according to data from iSuppli Corp.
06/29/2007 June 29, 2007 - Acacia Research Corp. says it has purchased three portfolios of patents from Alliance Semiconductor that include 36 US patents covering technologies ranging from memory (flash and DRAM), and computer and gaming console graphics.
06/29/2007 Designed to last 100,000 insertions, the DG-QFN40C-01 socket for 0.4-mm-pitch QFN 40-pin ICs from Ironwood Electronics suits a 5- × 5-mm package and operates at up to 40 GHz with <1 dB insertion loss. The socket is constructed with high-performance, low-inductance diamond particle interconnect contactor.
06/29/2007 Nextreme says its miniature thin film embedded thermoelectric cooler, eTEC, is an industry first, enabling seamless embedding of an active cooling and/or heating device in close proximity to an IC die. eTEC adds just 100 microns of height to a heat spreader.
06/29/2007 June 28, 2007 - Nearly half (48%) of global wafer capacity comes from the semiconductor industry's biggest 10 firms, and nearly a third of all capacity in 2006 came from the top five companies: Samsung, TSMC, Intel, Toshiba, and UMC, according to a new report from IC Insights.
06/28/2007 June 28, 2007 - Carnegie Mellon scientists say they have figured out a chemical process that makes block copolymers more effective electrical conductors, by treating the transistor's silicon dioxide base layer with a "grease"-like coating.
06/28/2007 June 28, 2007 - Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) has approved the first cross-strait solar wafer joint venture, with a mainland Chinese solar manufacturer, according to the Taiwan Economic News.
06/28/2007 June 28, 2007 - Primaxx Inc., an Allentown, PA-based developer of MEMS etch equipment, has agreed to be acquired by Sumitomo Precision Products Co. Ltd., its partner in Japan for selling and servicing MEMS-CET etching products, for an undisclosed all-cash deal.
Nextreme says its miniature thin film embedded thermoelectric cooler, eTEC, is an industry first, enabling seamless embedding of an active cooling and/or heating device in close proximity to an IC die. eTEC adds just 100 microns of height to a heat spreader.