Issue

ISMI’s Environment Safety Health (ESH) Program has undertaken specific projects to demonstrate efficiency and conserve energy in semiconductor manufacturing operations.

The International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) is actively involved in building the foundational infrastructure and coordination of activities to enable a 2012 pilot line target date at the direction of its members.

To help meet next-generation factory (NGF) challenges, ISMI has been tasked by its member companies to explore ways in which improvement in cycle time and cost reductions can achieve targets of 50% and 30%, respectively, by 2012.

Cycle-time improvements and time-waste reduction are being accomplished by improving equipment setup times and operations.

The International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative’s (ISMI’s) Metrology Program, as a result of its charter to evaluate leading-edge metrology, spends a great deal of time building and evaluating testing structures and techniques.

In 1987, Morris Chang, President of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and a 25-year veteran of Texas Instruments, recognized an opportunity to redefine semiconductor manufacturing.

The International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) has identified the use of non-product wafers (NPWs) as one of the significant costs to the fab.

These two tools for wafer edge (E30) and backside inspection (B30) provide improved sensitivity and high throughput for inspection and in-line monitoring of 32nm FEOL and BEOL manufacturing processes.

The SurfScan SP2XP monitor-wafer defect inspection system incorporates upgrades from the original edge-handling version SurfScan SP2XP, including improved sensitivity to defects on silicon/poly/metal films and enhanced ability to sort defects by type and size.

Despite a mild recovery in 2Q08, global DRAM makers are once again building inventories and pulling the rug out from prices, and the buildup will likely push out a full market recovery until the end of next year, according to a new warning by iSuppli.

The chrome material that has blocked the light on binary masks for a generation may finally have outlived its usefulness, according to Franklin Kalk, CTO of Toppan Photomasks, in an exclusive interview with SST.

We’re pleased to be bringing you this special issue, the result of a collaborative effort between ISMI and Solid State Technology, initiated last year.

ISMI ??? it’s all about productivity: increasing output and decreasing costs.