Issue

Nanotechnology is seen by many as “the next big thing.” It promises many new types of devices and effects that could be used in sensors, displays, light sources, and a host of other applications, in electronics as well as in a wide range of other fields.

After hitting a low point at the end of 2005, capital equipment investments by semiconductor firms are expected to pick up again in 2006 with 14% growth, nearly twice that of earlier predictions, according to new forecasts from Gartner Inc.

IBM researchers have fabricated a CMOS-type ring oscillator circuit entirely on one 18??m-long, single-walled carbon nanotube (SWCNT) using standard semiconductor processes [1], and taking advantage of the CNT??s long, thin structure.

As the limits to continued CMOS scaling loom larger, system designers are increasingly turning to multichip packages as a means to enhance performance without fitting ever more devices on a single chip.

While the leading lithography equipment suppliers race to achieve systems with higher numerical apertures, they are employing radically different means to achieve their ends.

Excimer and UV diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers can be used by the semiconductor industry, and others, in applications that cannot be performed by mechanical, chemical, or other laser fabrication methods.

Manufacturers of mobile displays are responding to demands from the market for improved features and performance by turning to innovative product design, selection of more suitable materials, and upgrades to process capabilities.

The 36th annual SEMICON West conference and exhibition will be held in San Francisco again this year with new special areas devoted to solving challenging problems.

The VB-300 e-beam lithography tool, successor to the VB6-UHR EWF, incorporates a 100kV high-brightness gun and 50MHz/20bit intelligent pattern generator, with field size capability of 1.

The 2005 International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS, p. 75) has generated a lot of press by designating the 450mm wafer size for production in 2012.

An automated, in-line mass-spectrometry (ILMS) system using basic time-of-flight principles has been developed that can detect part-per-trillion contamination levels of metals in harsh acid chemistries.

The value keff has become a valuable metric for evaluating the quality of the final integrated intermetal dielectric (IMD) film stack.

The addition of high-speed laser pulsing and local electrode geometry has transformed the 3D atom probe into a metrology tool that is capable of analyzing Si-based nanostructures on an atom-by-atom basis.

In this work, a reconfigurable optical proximity correction (OPC) approach is taken to enhance process window robustness for sub-100nm designs.

Photoresist stripping in IC manufacturing has become more challenging as the number of photoresist levels has increased, while at the same time allowable material loss and surface damage has decreased.