Issue

The Roadmap process has helped the semiconductor industry keep its entire manufacturing infrastructure moving forward at a rapid but synchronized pace, somewhat like rolling up a huge carpet without creating kinks and bulges.

In our modern world of semiconductor manufacturing, R_a is the symbol for average roughness of a surface (Roughness _average).

The adoption of low-k materials into Cu damascene device structures has taken longer and required more work than anyone in the semiconductor industry had predicted.

Solid State Technology asked IC manufacturers and a developer of strained silicon to comment on the roles of both strained silicon and SOI in future device technology.

Below the 100nm node, it is impossible to simultaneously meet drive current and gate leakage specifications for leading-edge devices using SiO₂ or SiON gate dielectrics. This has forced the fabrication of multiple transistor designs in a circuit.

Precise control of chemical mechanical planarization is becoming increasingly important, and uniformity is greatly influenced by the step and height of patterns.

Surface topography variations (currently >4000Å) within-die, die-to-die, and across the wafer, are major obstacles for the copper interconnect process today.

IC manufacturing always has been supported by metrology techniques that first prove their value in a laboratory setting and then transition to production applications.

Within wafer fabs where processing is done largely through the manipulation of ions and photons, chemical mechanical planarization and its slurry seem somewhat industrial.

As the rest of the world continues to stagnate, the semiconductor industry in China is not standing still. With double-digit economic growth last year, electronics manufacturing in China is booming as high-tech companies pour investment into ventures all along the value chain.

As the semiconductor industry recovers from its worst ever global economic downturn, we should begin to see both fabless companies and IDMs increase their demand for foundry capacity.

Foundries have transformed the way chips are made and because of them, Asia Pacific is fast becoming the center of the industry's manufacturing. With the success of the foundry model, more companies are moving into the neighborhood.

Korea's economy has been growing at 5–8% annually for many years, due in part to the success of foreign companies that have established operations there.

Wafer foundries have become an integral part of the semiconductor economy. Some analysts have forecast that foundries' share of wafer shipments will reach more than 40% of total volume within 10 years.

Today, the media overflows with news of turmoil in Asia: war-posturing on the Korean peninsula, theft of intellectual property in China, ethnic unrest along the Pacific Rim.