Issue

I had the good fortune to tour a solar cell manufacturing plant in East Germany earlier this year, and it was an eye-opening experience.

Things are looking bleaker by the month for companies serving semiconductor makers.

This year’s VLSI Symposium meeting (June 16-19, Waikiki, HI) highlighted 45nm to 16nm CMOS technology.

Among the papers presented by Intel at the VLSI Symposium was one describing fabrication of the smallest reported floating body cell (FBC) planar devices, with functional devices measuring down to 30nm gate length (#9.4, “A Scaled Floating Body Cell Memory with High-k + Metal Gate on Thin-Silicon and Thin-BOX for 15nm Node and Beyond”).

Dow Corning Electronics’ silicon lithography solutions group announced the commercial availability of Dow Corning XR-1541 e-beam resists, designed to enable the development of next-generation, direct-write lithography processing technology.

Resource constraints are appearing with increasing frequency in our work and personal lives. Those constraints usually present themselves in the form of higher prices—as predicted by the classic supply-and-demand economic model.

The photovoltaic industry’s growth is almost entirely due to favorable government policies.

Rechargeable all-solid-state batteries will play a key role in many future autonomous devices.

Germanium and III-V materials have emerged as possible successors to Si for high-performance digital logic transistors in VLSI applications.

Emerging applications, such as thin-film solar cell manufacturing in the solar industry and silicon/silicon germanium (Si/SiGe) epitaxy in the semiconductor industry, are using increasing levels of hydrogen gas in certain process steps.

An investigation of pump-induced large particles and their impact on computer hard drive substrate CMP (chemical mechanical polishing) is summarized.

The Sirius 6000 abatement system addresses greenhouse gas abatement challenges arising from dielectric and polysilicon etch processes used in semiconductor manufacturing.

The VK-9700 Color 3D laser scanning confocal microscope combines the capabilities of SEMs and non-contact profilometry with the simplicity of a conventional microscope.