Solid State Technology’s bloggers provide an insider’s point-of-view for electronic manufacturing such as semiconductor wafer fab, micro electromechanical systems (MEMS) manufacturing, and advanced packaging and test product announcements, industry tradeshows, process advances, and technologies.

Dr. Phil Garrou gives his insight into leading edge developments in 3-D integration and advanced packaging, reporting the latest technical goings on from conferences, conversations, and more.
• IFTLE 395: And Then There Were 3; IC History for the Younger Generation

  By Dr. Phil Garrou, Contributing Editor The IC industry “poker championship” is down to the last table The IC industry started out like a poker championship tournament. Hundreds of players, through the years, put up their entry fee to compete ( i.e. paying for their fabs) and the competition began. The most money was always made at the advanced nodes, i.e. the leading edge. There were winners [...]

DICK JAMES is a 40-year veteran of the semiconductor industry and the senior technology analyst for Chipworks, an Ottawa, Canada-based specialty reverse engineering company. Chipworks analyses a broad range of devices, giving Dick a unique overview of what technologies make it into the real world of semiconductor production.
• Intel announces tweaks to 22FFL process for RF, MRAM at IEDM18

  By Dick James At IEDM last year, Intel gave a half-dozen papers on various topics, including two on their 22FFL SoC process aimed at low power IoT and mobile products. The first (14.1) was an invited presentation on “Intel 22nm FinFET (22FFL) Process Technology for RF and mmWave Applications and Circuit Design Optimization for FinFET Technology”, and the second (18.1) introduced “MRAM as Embedded [...]

Pete's Posts covers topics germane to the electronics and solar industries, including semiconductor and photovoltaic solar cell manufacturing, advanced packaging, nanotechnology, MEMS and circuit board assembly.
• AI needs memory

  By Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief Artificial intelligence, which is extremely useful for analyzing large amounts of data (think image processing and natural language recognition), is already impacting every aspect of our lives. Products being made today are being redesigned to accommodate some form of intelligence that it can adapt to the preferences of the user. Smart speakers integrating Alexa or [...]

MEMS & Sensors Industry Group (MSIG), a SEMI strategic association partner, is the "go-to" resource for globally linking the MEMS and sensors supply chain to diverse markets. For more information, visit: http://www.semi.org/en/msig-information-hub

• Skin-Like Biocompatible Devices Come to Market – and to FLEX/MSTC

  By Maria Vetrano As director of the Center for Bio-Integrated Electronics at Northwestern University, Professor John A. Rogers explores soft materials for conformal electronics, nanophotonic structures, microfluidic devices and MEMS, all with an emphasis on bio-inspired and bio-integrated technologies. During his keynote at FLEX and MEMS & Sensors Technical Congress 2019, February 18-21 in Monterey, [...]

Dr. Vivek Bakshi blogs about EUV Lithography (EUVL) and related topics of interest. He has edited two books on EUVL and is an internationally recognized expert on EUV Source Technology and EUV Lithography. He consults, writes, teaches and organizes EUVL related workshops.
• Current Challenges and New Frontiers for EUV Sources: Update from 2018 Source Workshop

  By Vivek Bakshi, EUV Litho, Inc. The 2018 Source Workshop was held in November in Prague, co-organized with HiLASE. Workshop location was a brand new facility of ELI-BL across the street from HiLASE. These two institutions are doing leading work on developing new laser technologies. It was exciting to hold the workshop at these world-class institutes, where leading lasers not only are being developed, [...]

Ed's Threads - the first blog in the IC fab industry (launched 2006) - are Ed Korczynski's thoughts about IC, LED, and MEMS process development and about nanotechnology manufacturing markets. Ed has a degree in materials science and engineering from MIT, has decades of experience in Silicon Valley engineering and marketing, and won two ASBPE awards for editorial excellence writing for Solid State Technology. He is not lacking for opinions...
• Ruthenium Nanolayers are Ferromagnetic at RT

  Researchers from Intel Corporation and the University of Minnesota and the University of Wisconsin have shown that strained atom-scale films of pure ruthenium (Ru) metal exhibit ferromagnetism at room temperature, openning up the possibility of using the material to build novel magnetic random access memory (MRAM) devices. As per details recently published in Nature Communications (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-04512-1), [...]