Issue

In recent years, companies in the semiconductor industry have been collaborating much more than in the past.

Three decades of technological progress have provided exponential gains in IC performance over time and led to feature sizes in the tens of nanometers.

Providers of new low-k technologies have typically attempted to develop a complete integrated solution on their own by using proprietary technology and hoping for universal adoption in the market.

Nearly every product and component roadmap in the electronics industry is driven by miniaturization.

Solid State Technology asked industry experts to weigh in on what the rise of 300mm manufacturing means to the industry.

Laser ellipsometry (LE) and DUV reflectometry (DUVR) are now being used to monitor etch processes and reduce nonuniformities that had affected yield.

Semiconductor-manufacturing process control has historically relied on the dual approach of fixed statistical process-control (SPC) limits and limited metrology sampling.

Wafer bonding is one of the most powerful processing techniques used in the fabrication and packaging of MEMS devices, which usually have three-dimensional architectures.

Traditionally, bottom antireflective coatings (BARC) have mainly been used in critical layers for gates and contacts, but the application of BARC in implant layers also has become more desirable as device feature sizes shrink.

There is increasing awareness about the growing sensitivity of 193nm optics to acidic, basic, and condensable organic species in lithography bay environments.

Point-of-use chemical filtration for 193nm photoresists and bottom antireflective coating (BARC) formulations has become a crucial issue as semiconductor manufacturers struggle with defect densities in next-generation processes.

Semiconductor manufacturing applications require measurement of a wide range of pressures to ensure proper vacuum conditions.

A growing trend in broadband-networked digital consumer electronics has led to a paradigm shift in semiconductor manufacturing toward more rapid ramp-up, shorter cycle time, and high mix and low-volume "minifab" operations involving SoC production.