Issue

There may be trouble ahead for the conventional shrink approach to Moore’s Law.

Mask aligners are usually used as proximity printing tools where the mask is printed on the wafers using a “shadowing” technique.

The semiconductor industry’s last attempt to integrate porous dielectrics ended in a retreat to simpler solutions.

As the semiconductor industry has advanced to the beat of Moore’s Law, executives have repeatedly expressed concern about the rising cost of lithography.

The competitive requirement for increased device performance has compelled the IC industry to introduce lower dielectric constant (k) materials.

Through-silicon vias (TSV) will provide interconnect capability among multiple die in advanced three-dimensional integrated circuit (3D IC) designs.

Deep reactive ion etching (DRIE) has enabled the manufacturing of many different types of MEMS devices.

Dedicated molecular contamination analyzers based on ion mobility spectroscopy (IMS) can detect NH3 and SO2 contamination events in real time as well as measure ppt-level trends through long-term averaging.