11/29/2006 November 29, 2006 - Aviza Technology Inc. has appointed Masaaki Yashiro as president of its Japan KK unit, responsible for managing day-to-day operations, supporting Aviza's current customer base in Japan and broadening and strengthening the company's market presence in the region.
11/29/2006 North American-based semiconductor-equipment manufacturers posted a book-to-bill ratio of 0.95 in October 2006. Bookings averaged $1.50 B and billings reached $1.57 B.
11/29/2006 Advanced Semiconductor Engineering, Inc. (ASE) authorized director Alan Cheng to form a special committee to evaluate the purchase offer presented by a consortium of private equity and chairman and CEO Jason Chang, who may engage relevant consultants and other independent third parties to assist the special committee in its evaluation of the formal offer.
11/29/2006 November 29, 2006 - Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) is laying out plans that it hopes will support a doubling of production value for Taiwan's flat-panel display (FPD) industry by 2009, according to the Taiwan Economic News.
11/29/2006 InvenSense, a Santa Clara, Calif., provider of integrated motion sensing solutions for mobile applications, announced that its family of integrated dual-axis gyroscopes is currently being manufactured in high volume and is being shipped to a number of Japanese, Taiwanese, and American original equipment manufacturers.
11/29/2006 NaturalNano Inc., a materials science company, announced the introduction of its Pleximer product line. The company said Pleximer, which NaturalNano plans to offer commercially in fourth quarter 2007, is a turnkey nanocomposite additive enabling stronger, lighter materials for the $40 billion dollar polymer composite industry.
11/29/2006 Nov. 29, 2006 -- Hyphenated Systems, a Burlingame, Calif., provider of hybrid microscopy solutions for three-dimensional imaging and metrology in micro and nanotechnology, announced the release of its new HS200A NanoScale Optical Profiler.
11/28/2006 After 20 years of supplying single-wafer wet-processing systems, SEZ has released a new mass-production tool capable of performing extremely complex processes for front-end-of-line (FEOL) applications. The new Esanti tool combines with the DaVinci back-end-of-line (BEOL) tool such that SEZ can now address 60% of the total wet processing market.
11/28/2006 After months of pressure from domestic chipmakers, the Taiwan government says that by year's end it will lower the restrictions for transferring chipmaking technologies to mainland China to 0.18-micron processes. But with a lot of unanswered questions about the specifics -- and the government's history of delays and silence in previous related policy moves -- for now the decision seems to be as politically motivated as it is supportive of Taiwan's technology competitiveness.
11/28/2006 November 28, 2006 - The latest data from Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics (SICAS) indicates 300mm capacity is still coming online strong, but a slowdown in actual wafer starts during 3Q06 pushed overall utilization rates below the 90% mark for the first time in more than a year.
11/28/2006 November 28, 2006 - A new slice 'n' dice of supplier survey data from VLSI Research Inc., based across many categories of equipment performance and customer support, identifies the cream of the crop among large and small semiconductor equipment suppliers.
11/28/2006 November 28, 2006 - Brion Technologies and Hitachi High-Technologies are collaborating on a DFM platform that will enable chipmakers to detect, measure, and monitor optical proximity correction (OPC) defects during volume production of advanced semiconductors. Brion and Hitachi say the combined technologies in one interface will "vastly reduce the amount of time and number of operations required to generate a several-hundred point CD-SEM recipe for OPC evaluation."
11/28/2006 Rudolph Technologies, Inc., appointed Alex Oscilowski as chief operating officer, effective immediately. Oscilowski recently served as vice president of strategy at SEMATECH.
11/28/2006 Nov. 28, 2006 -- STMicroelectronics, one of the world's largest semiconductor suppliers and an industry leader in MEMS devices, announced it has inaugurated a new 200mm (8-inch) semiconductor wafer fabrication line dedicated to MEMS devices at its manufacturing site at Agrate, near Milan, Italy.
11/28/2006 The Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has placed a $11.5 million dollar order for seven FEI microscopes that will form the core of the University's new Center for Electron Nanoscopy (CEN).
11/28/2006 Veeco Instruments Inc. announced that it has received four orders for its R&D Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) systems. The orders extend across the Veeco R&D product line including a GEN20, GEN930, GEN II, and GEN III.
11/27/2006 November 27, 2006 - AXT Inc., a manufacturer of compound semiconductor substrates, said that founder and CTO Morris Young would retire from his position by year's end, although he will continue as a director. The company also indicated that new export rules in China will not have a significant impact on its financials.
11/27/2006 November 27, 2006 - After three years of behind-the-curtain development and joint work with several customers and foundries, Clear Shape Technologies Inc. has officially launched with an announcement of two flagship products, and a DFM-aware IC design flow resulting from a collaboration with Taiwan foundry United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC).
11/27/2006 November 27. 2006 - STMicroelectronics has inaugurated a new 200mm wafer fab line at its Agrate site near Milan, Italy, dedicated to manufacturing MEMS devices, saying it is the first major MEMS maker to make the devices on 200mm wafers.
