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04/25/2007  In series D funding, Lamina Ceramics, Inc., raised $7 million to fund expansion of its high-brightness, high-power LED business. Easton Capital Investment Group (New York and Florida) led the round.

04/25/2007  In response to the report of small-tech patent application review frustrations in a recent article, Small Times has received two letters, one from Under Secretary for Technology at the US Department of Commerce, Robert Cresanti and another from John Doll, Commissioner for Patents. Doll concludes by announcing upcoming forums for industry input, and in the meantime invites your comments.

04/24/2007  Zuken is supporting free footprint data for Texas Instruments' digital signal processor (DSP) products to CR-5000 users. The engineering consulting firm's Japanese, European, and American operations joined the TI DSP Third Party Network, increasing customer access to DSP designs.

04/24/2007  April 24, 2007 - Rasa Industries Ltd. is spending about 3 billion yen (US $25.3 million) on in its wafer reclamation business to boost 300mm wafer-handling capacity by 25% to 150,000 wafers/month by the end of the current fiscal year, to match growth in 300mm semiconductor production, notes the Nikkei Business Daily.

04/24/2007  April 24, 2007 - Powerchip Semiconductor Corp.'s 1Q07 earnings were its lowest since last summer, due to oversupplies and 60% price declines, but Taiwan's biggest memory chipmaker thinks the falling prices are spurring demand that will resurge later in the year, notes the Taipei Times.

04/24/2007  April 24, 2006 - Citing a number of factors ranging from mobile-phone shipments to lingering excess inventories and a slumping DRAM market, iSuppli Corp. has issued a "modest" revision, lowering its outlook for 2007 semiconductor sales to about 8% from 10.6%.

04/24/2007  Thin Film Electronics has signed two agreements to jointly develop production processes for its printed polymer memory technology. Prototypes are expected in fall 2007; volume processes in Q2 2008. Small Times' Tom Cheyney reports.

04/24/2007  Nanoforum, a pan-European nanotechnology network funded by the European Union, is conducting a survey to identify barriers and offer advice to the European Commission, with a goal of helping European companies commercialize nanotechnologies.

04/24/2007  SUSS MicroTec has unveiled a new placement and bonding system designed for R&D laboratories, universities, and pre-production environments. SUSS says the KADETT semi-automatic device bonder is a flexible and open platform for accurate assembly and bonding on a variety of substrates.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - Texas Instruments is the number one MEMS company worldwide thanks to its DLP chips business, raking in a record-setting $905 million in sales in 2006, nearly twice as much as No. 2 ranked Hewlett-Packard, according to German research firm Wicht Technologie Consulting. The firm's updated MEMS market survey also shows that HP led a pack of firms focusing on the biggest current MEMS cash cow: inkjet print heads.

04/23/2007  Applied Materials explains to WaferNEWS how its new Centura Mariana Trench Etch tool targets both higher cell capacitance and across-wafer uniformity for sub-70nm DRAM manufacturing requirements.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - Taiwan's top three DRAM chipmakers -- Nanya Technology Corp., PowerChip Semiconductor Corp., and ProMos Technologies Inc. -- plan to collectively raise more than $3 billion in 2Q07 to fund various expansion activities, primarily 300mm fab projects, notes the Taiwan Economic News.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - Innovative Micro Technology has begun offering getter deposition services of wafer-level packaging (WLP) of MEMS devices and other components requiring a hard vacuum, saying it has demonstrated vacuum levels below 10 mTorr for inorganic devices, equal to or better than industry standard.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., has developed an all-DRAM stacked-memory package using through-silicon vias (TSVs) housed in aluminum pads to avoid performance slow-downs caused by the redistribution layer.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - SEMATECH is funding an additional $2.4 million project to support Veeco Instruments Inc.'s R&D of its ion beam deposition tool for use in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, part of SEMATECH's Mask Blank Development Center at the U. of Albany campus in New York.

04/23/2007  InvenSense has completed the first public demonstration of its iG -- instant gesture -- technology. Made at the Spring Intel Developers Forum in Beijing, China, the demo featured several motion sensing applications running on Intel's UMPC and MID mobile platforms, including user interface control, gaming, and GPS navigation.

04/23/2007  Akita Elpida Memory, Inc., developed a 1.4-mm-thick multi-chip package (MCP) encompassing 20 thinned and stacked die. The company plans to incorporate processes used on this 20-die package to improve performance and manufacturability of more widely used 5- to 7-die-stack 3D packages.

04/23/2007  April 23, 2007 - Toshiba Corp. is planning to ramp production of NAND flash memory using 43nm process technologies in its current fiscal year, in an attempt to offset current memory price declines with projected 40% production cost reductions, according to Japanese daily newspapers. The new products are to be built at Toshiba's fourth domestic memory fab in Mie Prefecture that will come online later this year.

04/23/2007  OKI Electric's new ML8511 is a UV sensor IC that produces analog voltage output and does not require an optical cut filter. OKI says it was able to achieve high accuracy by mounting an op amp on the IC—and thus has made portable UV meters ready for practical use.

04/23/2007  Nemoptic says it has become the first bistable LCD display supplier to offer immediate availability of high volume, competitively priced e-paper displays. The progress represented by this deal will catalyze radical changes in document display and delivery.