07/13/2006  July 13, 2006 - Toshiba and SanDisk have officially laid out plans for their new NAND flash memory venture: a massive 100,000 wafer/month facility, with investments expected to top $3.0 billion through the end of 2008. And reportedly the two have picked a location for their next $5.2 billion megafab, also with 100,000 wafers/month capacity.

07/13/2006  Micron Technology Inc. joined IMEC's sub-32-nm CMOS research platform as a core partner, becoming the ninth IC company to engage in the project. Intel, Philips, Samsung, TSMC, Texas Instruments, and others participate in IMEC's 300-mm research facilities. Researchers define their work as the sharing of broad-range, basic research to solve core problems for sub-32-nm nodes.

07/12/2006  July 12, 2006 - Semiconductor Research Corp., a university-research consortium for semiconductor technologies, has opened a Non-Classical CMOS Research Center for five universities to collaborate on development III-V compound semiconductors, seeking production-quality results that could replace classical silicon CMOS as early as 2012.

07/12/2006  Socket and connector provider Antares conTech and UMD Advanced Test Technologies have executed a letter of intent to merge. The combined company, named Antares Advanced Test Technologies, will provide engineering services and products for semiconductor test.

07/12/2006  July 12, 2006 - Micron Technology Inc. has joined IMEC's sub32nm CMOS research platform as a core partner, and will participate in IMEC's advanced flash memory program, joining eight other global IC manufacturers and foundries, both groups announced.

07/12/2006  July 12, 2006 - European research consortium IMEC has extended its research program for 193nm immersion lithography to include double-patterning techniques to address needs of leading-edge process technologies, particularly for flash memory devices. The program now runs parallel to IMEC's other lithography efforts targeting hyper-NA immersion and extreme-ultraviolet lithography (EUV).

07/12/2006 

07/11/2006  July 11, 2006 - ASM America, a subsidiary of ASM International NV, and CEA-Leti are forming a joint development research program (JDP) to develop sub-45nm epitaxy and epitaxy pre-clean technologies, with the goal of finding alternative processing schemes for new front-end-of-line CMOS processing technologies.

07/11/2006  Ansoft Corporation announced that their circuit-simulation software for high-performance IC design — Nexxim — was accepted into the Cadence Design Systems, Inc., Connections Program. Cadence's Virtuoso Analog Design Environment already integrates other Ansoft software, including their Q3-D Extractor and TPA package analysis tools.

07/11/2006  An infusion of new fresh investments from chipmakers, particularly memory firms, has caused Gartner Inc. to hike its outlook for capital spending in 2006 -- but better growth this year will come at a steep price for the near future of the equipment industry.

07/11/2006  Tessera Technologies Inc., a provider of miniaturization technologies for the electronics industry, unveiled Shellcase CF, a wafer-level technology for optical components integrated into electronic products such as miniaturized cameras in camera phones, digital still cameras and video camcorders.

07/11/2006  Freescale Semiconductor has broken away from the pack in the race to commercialize magnetoresistive random access memory, or MRAM. The Austin, Texas-based company announced on Monday that it is in volume production of the world's first commercially available MRAM chip. The chip is intended to combine at least three qualities that previously had been unavailable together.

07/10/2006  July 10, 2006 - Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials Microelectronic Technologies and Dow Corning Corp. have renewed a joint development agreement to work on novel spin-on silicon hardmask antireflective coatings for sub-65nm lithography in flash, DRAM, and logic IC devices.

07/10/2006  July 11, 2006 - Freescale Semiconductor says it has ramped to volume production of its 4Mbit, 0.18µm-based magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) devices.

07/10/2006  The first commercial magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) device is now in volume production and available from Freescale Semiconductor.

07/06/2006  Staktek Holdings, Inc. formed a licensing agreement with Toshiba Corporation involving Staktek's NAND flash-memory stacking technologies. According to the terms of the agreement, Toshiba will be able to use certain Staktek stacking technologies for flash leaded packages until 2008.

07/05/2006  July 5, 2006 - Worldwide sales of semiconductors inched back up to a positive gain in May 2006, growing 0.7% from April to $19.6 billion, according to the SIA. Year-on-year, sales growth increased to 9.4%, from 8.1% in the previous month, and is expected to remain at 9%-10% ahead of last year's levels throughout the summer months.

07/05/2006 

06/30/2006  June 30, 2006 - Toshiba Corp. has licensed certain stacking technologies for NAND flash memory leaded packages, the two firms stated. Financial details of the two-year deal or the specific technologies licensed were not disclosed.

06/30/2006  June 30, 2006 - Nanosys Inc., Palo Alto, CA, says it has expanded its technology collaboration with Intel Corp. to include flash memory partner Micron Technology Inc., targeting development of nanostructures for high-density NAND flash memory for consumer electronics and portable storage applications.