Issue

It is relatively easy to define the mainstream semiconductor market as simply silicon-based CMOS logic and memory.

Susan Felch, principal member of the technical staff, frontend development at Spansion, summarized research she conducted while at Applied Materials???and done with IMEC???at the West Coast Junction Technology Group meeting, sponsored by the northern California chapter of the American Vacuum Society (AVS) and held in conjunction with this year’s SEMICON West.

Kicking off this year’s SEMICON West, IMEC said it has been able to achieve electrically functional 32nm SRAM cells (FinFETs).

The solar industry is blazing a new trail around the globe in a very similar way to the global expansion that the semiconductor industry experienced in the 1990s.

A fab’s inspection strategy is based on many variables, including the process technology, defect mechanisms, inspection equipment, fab logistics, and financial parameters [1].

In the continuous battle to improve critical dimension (CD) uniformity, especially for 45nm advanced logic products, one important recent advance is the ability to accurately verify the mask CD uniformity contribution to the overall global wafer CD error budget.

A new method for on-the-fly detection and correction of substrate-centering inaccuracies of a circular substrate is presented.

As semiconductor manufacturers continue to address cost, speed, and safety as key components of capital equipment tool installations in the last several years, few solutions exist to address the need to reduce installation cost without sacrificing installation quality and safety.

Patterned media technology on hard disk drives??? made possible by new lithographic processes with unprecedented levels of resolution, pattern precision, and cost of efficiency???overcomes limitations of superparamagnetic effects inherent in conventional technology.

The relative merits of solid-state drives (SSD) vs. hard-disk drives (HDD) have been discussed by analysts and technologists for some time.

The increasing demand for hard drives with greater storage density has motivated a technology shift from continuous magnetic media to patterned media hard disks.

Master templates for printing fine-pitch bit patterns on magnetic disk media can be manufactured using e-beam lithography to write lower pitch chemical contrast marks onto the substrate.

The drive for higher capacity in storage devices has forced disk drive manufacturers to develop technologies to improve storage density.