Issue

In Europe, the EUCLIDES program has obtained preliminary throughput and cost-of-ownership results in its comparison of laser plasma and synchrotron sources. In addition, researchers have doubled the EUV flux at the wafer to in crease throughput and have obtained impressive results with optical coatings and optical substrate fabrication. An EUV test bench is now under construction, moving this consortium toward its 2000 goal of beginning assembly of a beta system.

Beam-line ion implantation, the pre-eminent doping method in silicon, is being pushed to the limit by the need to fabricate ultra-shallow junctions.

Simply setting an overall gas purity specification may not be sufficient to assure that optimum quality gas is consistently delivered to a process without a more detailed study of the gas supply's impurity fingerprint.

Automation solutions should not be analyzed separately from the total production environment. While few automation solutions add value directly to the product, all affect the performance of the entire production system. Understanding and controlling the behavior and performance of this system is paramount to implementing a controlled process that satisfies the business objectives of the factory.

Full traceability of a finished IC through fabrication, assembly, packaging, and testing requires seamless integration of tracking data related to each process step.

Historically, thin-film head (TFH) lithography resolution has lagged that of silicon, but there have always been special challenges to patterning TFH structures. Today, however, TFH resolution requirements are changing at nearly twice the rate of mainstream silicon, as shown in Fig. 1. At this rate of change, by about 2005, lithography resolution for TFHs will match those of silicon, but in much different circumstances.

Lithography continues to be the largest capital investment and the largest operating cost component of leading-edge fabs. The increasing acceleration of the industry roadmap is driving lithography to ever smaller feature sizes, while next-generation lithography (NGL) technologies continue to remain out of reach for production.

Although the upticks in semiconductor business have been steady for a few months now, the buildup has been slow. Some analysts believe that what we are seeing is demand being driven mainly by the need to upgrade infrastructure and speed up access to the Internet.

A monthly roundup of semiconductor manufacturing news from around the globe.

In September TechNews:
New underfill material attacks flip-chip challenges
300mm etch-toolsnapshot given
New concept in long throw sputtering
Matrix test process control reduces costs

Semicon West '99 opened in San Francisco under sunny skies - appropriate conditions for a show marked by tempered optimism.

This month in AsiaFocus
UMC eyes 300mm fab
Malaysian fab 1st Silicon readies for ramp
Asia Brief

Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Santa Clara, CA, and The Kinetics Group Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of US Filter Corp., have appointed several executive officers to their new joint venture, TRiMEGA Electronics LLC. Dean T. Duffy has been named president. He was previously director of Air Products Electronics Asia.

Lithography filter media. LifeSpan Plus molecular filtration media is formulated to protect lithography tools from airborne molecular contaminants such as ammonia, NMP, and harmful organics.

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