Issue

Squeezed margins, rising and shifting R&D costs, supply base consolidation, a slowing of technology innovation, and other signs have some prognosticators saying that the best days of the semiconductor industry are behind us.

Solid State Technology asked nanotechnology experts to put forth their vision of the challenges ahead.

As IC device structures become more complex and more CMP steps are added to manufacturing these devices, CMP process yield comes under greater scrutiny.

Following are the Top Products of 2004 in semiconductor/thin-film processing as selected by Solid State Technology's editorial advisory board.

Device fabrication at the sub-90nm technology node mandates that integrated metrology equipment measure complex structures and new materials directly on virtually every patterned production wafer, without sacrificing throughput.

Recent advances have enabled magnetic-field imaging to identify high-resistance defects in packaged ICs within a resolution of 20??m on the device.

Fabrication of the multicomponent structure of ultrahigh-brightness light-emitting diodes (UHB-LED) with metal organic chemical-vapor deposition (MOCVD) requires accurate control of layer thickness to better than 1%, 1% composition uniformity over the substrate surface area, and control of the heterostructure interface quality and sharpness, the latter on the order of one monolayer.

Analyzing the results of critical-dimension uniformity wafers from step-and-scan systems using different metrology tools revealed a random contribution to the overall CD variation that could not be attributed to the exposure tool or to the metrology tool's repeatability.