12/07/2005 Phoenix, AZ — Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials CMP Technologies' new Asia-Pacific Manufacturing and Technical Center at the Hsinchu Science Park, Chunan satellite campus in Taiwan is now open, adding to the company's growing business in Asia. Commercial production will begin by the first quarter of 2007.
12/07/2005 December 7, 2005 - At Semicon Japan, a new ultraviolet thermal processing platform from Novellus was introduced that blends industry-standard lamp-based UV light sources with the company's multistation sequential processing architecture.
12/06/2005 Clinton, NY — Indium Corp. has recently promoted Tony Howard to global account manager — in this position, he is responsible for promoting Indium's products and services by focusing on several key global accounts. He reports to Dave Preische, global sales manager.
12/06/2005 Midland, MI — Dow Corning Corp. has been named Specialty Chemicals Company of the Year by global market analysts Frost & Sullivan, who highlighted Dow Corning's ability to drive innovation, its customer solutions approach, success in geographic expansion, and exceptional financial results.
12/06/2005 December 6, 2005 - At the International Electron Devices meeting this week in Washington, DC, news includes: 1) Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. have developed carbon nanotube-based heatsinks for semiconductor chips. 2) Freescale Semiconductor has demonstrated a transistor that overcomes many of the challenges associated with vertical multigate devices. 3) STMicrolectronics unveiled a 65nm NOR Flash technology with a small cell size of 0.042 sq microns.
12/06/2005 China Automotive Systems Inc., a Wuhan, Hubei, China, power steering components and systems supplier and Sensor System Solutions Inc., an Irvine, Calif., manufacturer of MEMS sensors, interface electronics and control systems, announced a new project for its joint venture to manufacture and distribute manifold absolute pressure (MAP) and temperature and manifold air pressure (TMAP) sensors in India, as well as provide technical and commercial support to an unnamed Indian automobile manufacturer.
12/05/2005 Hong Kong and Pleasanton, CA — ASAT Holdings Limited and ASAT Inc. have appointed Alan Dworak as senior VP of worldwide sales, in which he will be in charge of all aspects of the company's global sales and customer service. Effective in his new position immediately, he will be based in the Singapore office.
12/05/2005 Milpitas, CA — The RapidChip system-on-chip (SoC) prototyping platform is based on the ARM926EJ-S processor, and is now available from LSI Logic Corp. The new platform enables designers to emulate their cell-based ASIC or RapidChip Platform ASIC design before tape out, provides FPGA-based system verification, and enables earlier beginnings for software development.
12/05/2005 San Jose, CA — Worldwide semiconductor sales beat $20 billion in October, a new industry feat, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association's (SIA) Global Sales Report (GSR), which is a 3-month moving average of sales activity. Worldwide semiconductor sales of $20.0 billion increased 6.75% from the $18.8 billion reported for October 2004. Sales were up 2.5% sequentially from the $19.6 billion reported for September.
12/02/2005 Dennis Winters, Samsung Austin Semiconductor LP; Richard Kent, Fabworx Solutions Inc.
Fabs operating cluster tools from the 1990s frequently report robot-related wafer scratching as a common source of yield loss. When scratching occurs, the probability of killing a die is nearly 100%. The dominant cause of wafer scratching in these tools is robot droop, a result of wear that causes the robot blade to use more of the vertical clearance between the wafers within a cassette.
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - Researchers at the U. of Tokyo have created a flexible Braille display utilizing organic semiconductor devices -- plastic actuators driven by an organic field-effect transistor active matrix.
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - The IEEE has begun work on a new standard to define methods for testing carbon nanotubes used as additives in bulk materials, and how to report data about the materials' performance.
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - Public-private partnership SemIndia and Indian state government have announced plans to spend roughly $3 billion to build the first semiconductor manufacturing plant in India, licensing x86 microprocessor and logic technology from AMD.
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - Total utilization rates for IC production rose slightly to 90.1% in 3Q05, up from 89.1% in 2Q05 and 84.8% in 1Q05, with run rates for leading-edge technologies (<0.12 microns, and 0.12-0.16 microns) pushing to 96%-97% by the end of September, according to data from Semiconductor International Capacity Statistics (SICAS).
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - Researchers at Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT) have developed a way to fabricate functional resistance random-access memory (RRAM) using existing electronic materials, possibly opening a pathway to low-cost mass production of the technology touted as faster, low-power alternative to flash memory.
12/02/2005 December 2, 2005 - Intel Corp. said yesterday that it plans to build a new $3.5 billion, 300mm wafer fabrication facility at its site in Kiryat Gat, Israel. The new factory will produce chips using 45nm process technology and will be operational in 2008.
