Issue

Jeff Welser, director of the Nanotechnology Research Initiative, is on a mission to find a replacement for the transistor, which is rapidly approaching fundamental limitations.

While high-density through-silicon vias (TSV) hold the limelight in advanced packaging development, a low-density via-through-pad version of TSV has moved past them to production.

Historically, photovoltaic (PV) manufacturers have developed in-house capability one machine at a time, and since the industry was small, there was little outside interest in changing this paradigm.

At advanced technology nodes (65nm and below) there is a need for cleaning technology that better manages the ever-shrinking cleaning process window.

KLA-Tencor Corporations’s latest inspection product, the PVI-6, designed for optical in-line dual-sided inspection of photovoltaic (PV) wafers and cells, can inspect solar wafers and cells at the highest speed and accuracy for all stages of the production process, according to the company.

The most expensive component of crystalline silicon-based PV manufacturing flow is the wafer — reducing wafer fabrication cost is considered key to the goal of making solar energy competitive with grid power.

For the most part, the universes of wafer probes and sockets have customarily been separate and distinct.

While most copper back-end-of-line (BEOL) memory applications today utilize a single damascene layer of copper for the bitline, there are growing applications that utilize multiple copper layers and dual damascene.

The trends of decreasing dimensions and new materials motivated the investigation of how these may affect the dielectric reliability of the interconnect structures.

Traditional incoming wafer quality analysis methods have proven inadequate in detecting polishing induced defects (PID).

Thermal laser separation (TLS) is used to separate brittle materials using well known basic principles.