02/09/2006 Palo Alto, CA — 1× full-field photomasks supplier Image Technology, a wholly owned subsidiary of SUSS MicroTec, has acquired a Lasertec Large Area Mask (LAM) defect inspection tool to enhance their full production line for advanced 9-in. photomasks.
02/09/2006 February 9, 2006 -- PennWell Corporation has named veteran publisher David Barach to the position of group publisher of Solid State Technology and Advanced Packaging Packaging magazines, effective February 1.
02/09/2006 Nashua, NH — PennWell Corp. has named veteran publisher David Barach to the position of Group Publisher of Advanced Packaging Magazine, effective February 1st.
02/09/2006 February 7, 2006 -- /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- MINNEAPOLIS-- FSI International, Inc. (Nasdaq:FSII) today announced that its nickel-platinum strip process, the PlatNiStrip(TM), has been qualified and implemented by several of the world's largest IC makers for manufacturing 65nm technology devices.
02/09/2006 February 7, 2006 -- /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- PEARL RIVER, N.Y. -- Hudson Technologies, Inc. has announced that its refrigerant testing lab has been certified by the Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute ("ARI") under ARI's Refrigerant Testing Laboratory Certification Program.
02/09/2006 February 7, 2006 -- MEDICAL INDUSTRY E-MAIL NEWS SERVICE(TM) -- FALLS CHURCH VA USA -- Roll up your sleeves for this interactive, hands-on training course, where you'll apply the Part 11 Toolkit to a sample database - or bring your own database and apply the Part 11 Toolkit to your program.
02/09/2006 BERKELY, Calif. -- With support from the California Energy Commission's Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) Program, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) is performing standardized testing of the energy performance of fan-filter units (FFUs) at no cost to participants.
02/09/2006 February 7, 2006 -- /PRIMEZONE/ -- TAMPA, Fla. -- Identica Holdings Corporation announces the release of its new Vascular Pattern Recognition (VPR) biometric scanner treated with Antimicrobial Silver.
02/09/2006 February 6, 2006 -- /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- SOMERVILLE, Mass. -- Spotfire, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of Spotfire Analytics for Semiconductor, a collection of proven tools and workflows that apply process-specific interactive analytics to customer engineering and manufacturing data to reduce time to market for new high tech products.
02/08/2006 February 9, 2006 - SanDisk Corp. and Toshiba have accelerated plans to add 50% capacity the Fab 3 300mm wafer fab in Yokkaichi, Japan, to 70,000 wafers/month by March 2007, at a cost of approximately $500 million.
02/08/2006 February 8, 2006 - Invarium Inc., San Jose, CA, has introduced a new product that it claims is superior to current RET and OPC tools for patterning IC layouts of 65nm- and below chipmaking processes, with an eye toward 32nm and EUV lithography.
02/08/2006 Sydney, Australia — CAP-XX Inc. has received Frost & Sullivan's 2005 Technology Innovation of the Year Award in nanotechnology-enabled supercapacitors for research that led to a breakthrough nanotechnology process for producing thin and flat, or prismatic, supercapacitors to meet the pulse-power requirements of portable devices.
02/08/2006 By Masataka Tsubo, WaferNews Contributing Editor, Japan
With 65nm production ramping, the focus at SEMICON Japan in December turned to cutting-edge technology for 45nm production and 32nm development, leaving lithography suppliers in the unenviable position of midwifing two new exposure technologies into production at once.
02/07/2006 February 7, 2006 - Underscoring its commitment to seeking high-growth consumer segments outside the PC world, Freescale Semiconductor is teaming up with longtime Crolles2 partner STMicroelectronics to drive IBM's PowerPC architecture further into applications in the automotive market.
02/07/2006 By Paula Doe, Contributing Editor, WaferNews
Big players introduced tools for 45nm production at SEMICON Japan, but much of the activity was in improved materials that could at least be hyped as nanotechnology, and of course in more new types of metrology tools, with wafer-edge inspection a particularly hot niche for new product introductions. The other major theme: diversification into new markets for all sorts of players.
Analysts surveyed by WaferNews generally see steadily improving growth for the semiconductor market for the next three years - and more muted cycles than the wild days of the past. Projections for chip sales in 2006 cluster in the mid single digits, although the optimists see as much as 17%-20% growth, thanks to a healthy world economy and plenty of hot consumer products.
02/07/2006 Santa Clara, CA — Sigrity Inc. has acquired a worldwide perpetual unrestricted license to advanced single and multi-chip IC package design technology from Synopsys Inc., including technology embodied in Synopsys' Encore products.
02/07/2006 February 7, 2006 - A new analyst report suggests the market for various types of nano-enabled memory will quadruple from $1.4 billion in 2008 to more than $7.0 billion in 2010, as conventional memory technologies fail to scale to address problems in leading-edge chip technologies such as leakage.
