Category Archives: Materials and Equipment

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is requesting nearly $2.4 billion “to protect and promote public health” as part of the President’s fiscal year 2009 (FY09) budget. This amount would be a 5.7 percent increase over the budget that FDA received for the current fiscal year. The FY09 request covers the period of Oct. 1, 2008 through Sept. 30, 2009.

The budget proposal includes strategic increases to strengthen food protection, modernize drug safety, speed approval of generic drugs, and improve the safety and review of medical devices. The request also includes funds to cover cost of living increases for FDA employees that perform the agency’s scientific and highly specialized public health mission.

“The FDA is committed to protecting and promoting the health of the American people,” says Andrew C. von Eschenbach, M.D., Commissioner of FDA. “This budget enables us to continue development of the staff and programs necessary to safeguard the food we eat and improve the safety and development of drugs, vaccines, devices, and other medical products.”

During FY09, FDA will experience a full-time equivalent staff increase of 526. The FY09 budget supports additional staff for priority areas such as food defense and food safety, as well as drug, blood, and human tissue safety programs. FDA will also work to ensure the safety of domestic and imported food and medical products by conducting more domestic and foreign inspections and more inspections of high-risk foods.

FDA’s key proposed budget increases support the following:

  • Protecting America’s food supply ($42.2 million). FDA’s Protecting America’s Food Supply initiative integrates food safety and food defense and uses a comprehensive, preventative, and risk-based approach to safeguard the food supply and the American homeland (see “Food Safety Plan Emphasizes ‘Effective Action’ to Prevent Food Supply Contamination,” CleanRooms magazine, December 2007, p. 8).

    The foundation of the plan is to increase its focus on prevention, to identify potential food threats to the food supply, and counteract them before they harm consumers. The FY09 increase will allow the agency to focus on the most important food defense and food safety issues throughout the entire life cycle of foods, from production through consumption. In FY 2009, FDA will devote more workforce and resources to food production and handling sites, whether they are located in the United States or abroad.

  • Medical product safety and development ($17.4 million, $79.0 million user fees). This initiative provides targeted resources to improve the safety of human and animal drugs, blood, human tissues, and medical devices. FDA says the resources will strengthen its ability to effectively monitor the safety of medical products, including imported products. The agency will also help medical product manufacturers develop new technologies to treat life-threatening diseases and conditions.

    In 2007, Congress enacted the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act (FDAAA). The FY09 budget implements new drug and medical device safety programs in FDAAA that are funded by user fees. As a result, FDA will strengthen its ability to regulate medical products and ensure their safety and effectiveness for the American public.

  • Management efficiencies. The FY09 budget also captures the productivity savings (

The UPF OptoCooler is well suited for opto-electronics applications. (Photo: Nextreme)

January 24, 2008 — Nextreme Thermal Solutions, which develops microscale thermal and power management products for the electronics industry, has announced a new thermoelectric module.

The company’s Ultra-High Packing Fraction (UPF) OptoCooler addresses the latest cooling and temperature control requirements for optoelectronics, electronics, medical, military and aerospace applications, the company said. It has been optimized for laser diode, LED and advanced sensor products.

The module was developed in response to market demand for microscale cooling solutions that improve the performance of electronics without sacrificing efficiency, the company said.

With Nextreme’s thin-film thermal bump technology at its core, the OptoCooler can be integrated directly into electronic and optoelectronic packaging to deliver more than 45°C of cooling for a wide variety of thermal management applications.

The new facility was specifically designed to meet the increasing customer demand in need of qualifying a new cleaning process but also evaluate and compare the cleaning performances. In addition to personalized technical support provided by our on-site process engineers, customers now have access to an analytical platform specifically designed to conduct a wide range of cleanliness testing in compliance with the latest IPC, J-STD and DIN standards.

(January 24, 2008) SAN JOSE, CA — Honeywell Electronic Materials and the US Display Consortium (USDC), a public/private partnership chartered with developing the supply chain for the flat panel display industry, have announced a new agreement to develop materials for flexible electronics. Under this new $500,000 agreement, Honeywell will focus on developing materials to prevent short circuits in leading-edge flexible electronics for devices used by the US military.

Jan. 21, 2008 – Fujifilm says its electronics materials subsidiary has purchased an advanced argon fluoride (ArF) immersion scanner to help accelerate the push to bring its new family of ArF immersion photoresists to high-volume manufacturing.

Evaluating the materials on the same tools its customers use, which is compatible with 45nm-32nm node immersion litho processes using an ArF laser source, will help the company continuously evaluate ArF immersion resists and respond more quickly to customer engineering and design requests, the companies explained in a statement.

“Acquisition of this toolset is essential to achieve high market-share in this very competitive technology area,” stated Keiji Mihayashi, president and CEO of Fujifilm Electronic Materials USA. Combined with the company’s FAiR product line, “we will accelerate our presence in the market by leveraging these advances in topcoat-free technology and by extending them to new high-quality photoresists being developed for 32nm manufacturing.”

Jan. 21, 2008 – The two leading R&D centers for EUV lithography, IMEC in Europe and the U. of Albany’s College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CSNE), say they will jointly perform experiments for EUV in order to “demonstrate the practical feasibility of EUVL and build confidence in the technology for the 32nm half-pitch device node and below.”

First experiments will be done in Albany, focusing mainly on the system’s imaging capabilities, with other efforts looking at new materials and equipment technology. Future studies will be carried out at either location depending on throughput and tool availability. Key collaborators will include IBM and litho tool vendor ASML, which shipped its alpha EUV tools to both CSNE and IMEC in mid-2006.

“We have a unique opportunity to enable significant advances in EUVL technology that are vital to the manufacturing of future generations of nanoelectronics devices,” said Alain Kaloyeros, VP and chief administrative officer of the CNSE, in a statement.

EUV lithography is seen as a promising technology to help scale CMOS beyond the 32nm node, but “still major challenges need to be overcome,” stated Luc Van den hove, IMEC VP/COO. IMEC litho program director Kurt Ronse added that EUV is still in a development phase and alpha tools need upgrades, so opening up the facilities to the other for EUV experiments “can guarantee acceleration of EUV research to our industrial partners.”

Jan. 18, 2007 – December results for semiconductor equipment demand show a nice close to what was otherwise a lousy 2007, according to the latest data from SEMI.

Bookings rose 8.6% in December to $1.23B, the first M-M increase since May and best bookings level since September. The Y-Y growth is still 18% lower than Dec. 2006 (and seven straight months of double-digit Y-Y declines), but is slightly better than recent M-M declines of 20% or more since mid-summer. Billings also showed improvement, down just -0.5% M-M to $1.38B, its best showing since August.

Perhaps the best news is in the book-to-bill ratio (B:B), which for months had been languishing around the 0.80 mark. It’s still well below the 1.0 parity mark (11 months and counting), but rose to 0.89 in December, indicating that $89 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed.

Tallying up preliminary full-year SEMI data, it looks like 2007 ended with about a 3.2% gain in chip tool sales from North American suppliers to $18.50B, though orders dropped -9.6% to $16.63B.

In a statement, SEMI president Stanley Myers suggested “a modest 2% growth” in 2007 billings. He also said the lower bookings reflect a “general expectation” of a -10% dropoff in capital expenditures in 2008.

North American equipment bookings, billings — Dec. 2006-Dec. 2007

Month…….Billings…….%M-M………%Y-Y……….Bookings……..%M-M……..% Y-Y………B:B
……………..(US $M)…………………………………………….(US $M)…………………………………..
………………(3-mo. avg.)………………………………….(3-mo.avg.)……………………………………..

Dec’06…………..1482.3……-0.2%……..21.1%……….1497.2……..5.0%…….31.0%……..1.01
Jan’07…………..1448.0……-2.3%……..15.0%……….1445.8…….-3.4%…….17.9%……..1.00
Feb’07………….1423.0……-1.3%……..11.3%……….1398.1……..-3.1%……..8.3%……..0.98
Mar’07………….1436.4……..0.9%……….7.3%………..1419.6……..1.5%…….2.5%……..0.99
Apr’07………….1594.7……..11.0%……..10.1%………1567.5……..10.4%…..-2.1%……..0.98
May’07………….1670.2……..4.7%………15.0%………1641.9………4.7%…….1.4%……..0.98
June’07…………1768.1……..5.9%……….13.5%……..1607.6……..-2.1%……-9.8%……..0.91
July’07………….1685.8…….-4.7%……..2.9%………..1406.3……..-12.5%…..-18.9%……..0.83
Aug’07…………1682.3……-0.2%……..-3.5%………..1371.2………-2.5%……-20.7%……..0.82
Sept’07………..1557.4…….-7.4%……..-6.9%………..1235.0……..-9.9%……-24.7%……..0.79
Oct’07 ………….1477.5……-5.1%……..-5.5%………..1176.9………-4.7%……-19.9%……..0.80
Nov’07 (f)……..1383.2…….-6.4%………-6.9%……….1130.7…….-3.9%……-20.7%……..0.82
Dec’07 (p)……1376.9……-0.5%………-7.1%……….1227.8………8.6%…….-18.0%……0.89

FY06 (p)…….18503.5…….N/A………..-7.1%……….16628.4…….N/A………-9.6%……..0.90

To mark the occasion, Ian Jenkins, Multitest’s VP Asia, and Nigel Beddoe, Multitest’s regional manager in Malaysia, presented an award to Gene Gretchen, managing director of ST Miroelectonics’ Muar plant, as the recipient of MT9308, serial number 0111104495, being the 1000th multitest handler in Malaysia.

(January 18, 2008) SAN JOSE, CA — North American-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.23B in orders in December 2007 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.89, according to the December 2007 Book-to-Bill Report published yesterday by SEMI.

Bringing more than 35 years of international experience in electronic interconnection and packaging technology, Fjelstad will briefly trace the history of thermal management across the various stages of electronics and at different hierarchical levels, reviewing some of the innovative ways that thermal management engineers have responded to the challenges over time in his presentation, “Beating the Heat