12/13/2001  By carefully cooling a molten germanium-silicon mixture inside a cylindrical container, NASA scientists can coax it into forming a single large and extraordinarily well-ordered crystal. Such crystals have very few defects because, remarkably, they never touched the walls of the very container in which they grew, according to reports from [email protected].

12/12/2001  Dec. 12, 2001 - Minneapolis, MN - FSI International Inc. has implemented additional cost reductions including a 7% reduction in the overall work force, salary cuts for all employees, a 50% decrease in capital expenditures, and a reduction in other discretionary costs.

12/05/2001  December 5, 2001 -- TOKYO -- ASML recently announced the creation of a new Asian training center based in Kawasaki, Japan. The facility will provide a variety of training courses in advanced lithography, wafer track and thermal processing technology, with a particular focus on 300mm equipment.

12/05/2001  Despite all the gloom and doom coming from Japan's struggling chipmakers lately, a few of the country's equipment suppliers continue to do surprisingly well.

12/05/2001  Dec. 5, 2001 - Tokyo, Japan - On the opening day of SEMICON Japan 2001, ASML announced the creation of a new Asian training center based in Kawasaki, Japan.

11/29/2001  Nov. 29, 2001 - Geneva, Switzerland - STMicroelectronics' advanced CMOS development teams headed by Thomas Skotnicki at its Central Research & Development facility in Crolles, France, have received two awards granted by the semiconductor and solid-state physics community: the Paul Rappaport Award for the best IEEE paper in 2000 and also the Best Paper award for the ESSDERC 2000 conference, held in Cork, Ireland, in September 2000.

11/29/2001  Nov. 29, 2001 - San Jose, CA - The 2001 edition of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) calls for more aggressive scaling than previously planned.

11/28/2001  What can the semiconductor industry learn from the petrochemical folks? A lot, when it comes to the evolution of advanced process control (APC). In the early days of APC in the petrochem industry, process and instrumentation technologies were considered totally unrelated issues by operating companies.

11/21/2001  Nov. 21, 2001 - Veldhoven, Netherlands - ASM Lithography NV (ASML) said it will not be able to sell its Tinsley Laboratories unit -- acquired when the Dutch company bought Silicon Valley Group this spring -- by a Nov. 22 target date set by US government officials.

11/19/2001  Nov. 19, 2001 - San Diego, CA - JMAR Technologies, a provider of precision micro- and nanotechnology products, announced that its JMAR/JSAL NanoLithography Inc. (JSAL) division, Burlington, VT, has received a $1.2 million contract from a major New England-based aerospace firm to provide a continuing range of X-ray lithography (XRL) support services funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

11/14/2001  November 14, 2001 -- NOGALES, AZ -- Alpha Pro Tech, a developer, manufacturer and marketer of disposable protective apparel for the medical, dental, industrial safety, cleanroom and food service markets, announced 6.9 percent lower sales for the three months ended September 30.

11/14/2001  Modelers at Sandia National Laboratories are helping micromachine designers choose the device they want fully fabricated through new nano-modeling programs.

11/14/2001  November 14, 2001 - San Jose, CA - KLA-Tencor Corp. announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has successfully completed its beta evaluation of KLA-Tencor's TeraStar SLF27 reticle inspection system on advanced sub-wavelength reticles used in manufacturing devices with design rules as small as 130 nm.

11/08/2001  Traditional yield enhancement techniques focus on analyzing the causes of killer defects - those due to sources of contamination on the wafer and in the factory. However, feature-limited yield is becoming a dominant driver of overall yield as the industry goes further and further into the deep sub-micron (DSM) region.

11/07/2001  November 7, 2001 -- NOGALES, AZ -- Alpha Pro Tech, a developer, manufacturer and marketer of disposable protective apparel for the medical, dental, industrial safety, clean room and food service markets, says that demand for its N-95 Particulate Respirator face mask, which is NIOSH (National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health) approved, has required the company to add additional shifts. The company is also anticipating building additional equipment.

11/02/2001  November 2, 2001 - San Diego, CA - JMAR Technologies Inc. a provider of precision micro- and nanotechnology products, said its JMAR-SAL NanoLithography Inc. (JSAL) division, Burlington, VT, has been awarded US patent number 6,295,332, titled Method for Improving X-ray Lithography in the Sub-100nm Range to Create High Quality Semiconductor Devices.

11/01/2001  November 1, 2001 - Round Rock, TX - DuPont Photomasks Inc. founder Kenneth Rygler is resigning to pursue personal and other interests. Rygler, exec. VP of worldwide marketing and strategic planning at DuPont, will serve as a consultant to the company.

10/25/2001  October 25, 2001 - San Jose, CA, and Round Rock, TX - KLA-Tencor Corp. and DuPont Photomasks Inc. have completed beta testing of KLA-Tencor's TeraStar SLF27 reticle inspection tool at DuPont Photomasks' Round Rock facility, two additional TeraStar tools have been ordered. In addition to the system in Round Rock, new tools are being installed at DuPont Photomasks Taiwan and the DPI Reticle Technology Center, a photomask R&D facility.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Murray Hill, NJ - Scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs report that they have created organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length, which they say will set the stage for a new class of high-speed, inexpensive carbon-based electronics.

10/16/2001  October 16, 2001 - Veldhoven, Netherlands - As a consequence of the continuing downturn in the semiconductor industry, ASML Holding NV (ASML) will accelerate integration with its newly merged Silicon Valley Group in the US and will further reduce its global work force by approximately 1,400 positions (17%), compared with today's work force of 8,000. This will result in a total work force of 6,600 by the end of the 1H02.