04/23/2013 

The critical processes and technologies necessary to continue Moore’s Law are currently more uncertain than ever before in the history of advanced semiconductor manufacturing.

04/22/2013 

SAMCO Inc, head quartered in Kyoto, Japan, has expanded its OPTO Films Research Laboratory in California’s Silicon Valley in order to strengthen its research structure and after-sale process support.

04/19/2013 

The market for Bluetooth semiconductors is expected to boom by nearly 100 percent from 2011 to 2017, with the majority of the growth driven by demand for wireless combination integrated circuits (ICs) and mobile system-on-chip (MSoC) devices with integrated wireless connectivity that are used in mobile devices like smartphones and media tablets.

04/19/2013 

The semiconductor chip giant revealed plans to branch out beyond PCs. Will it work?

04/19/2013 

In order to meet the rapidly growing business demands in the Chinese market and further expand the mass market in that region, Freescale Semiconductor announced today that the company plans to open ten new sales offices covering key areas across the mainland area.

04/19/2013 

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.14 billion in orders worldwide in March 2013 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.14, according to the March Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.

04/18/2013 

AIXTRON SE today announced that the University of Cambridge has successfully commissioned another multi-wafer Close Coupled Showerhead (CCS) MOCVD reactor at its new facility at the Department of Material Science and Metallurgy. The CCS 6x2-inch system will be configured to handle single 6-inch (150mm) wafers (1x6-inch).

04/18/2013  The IC fabrication industry is approaching the end of the road for device miniaturization, with both atomic and economic limits looming on the horizon.

04/17/2013 

Cree, Inc. and Delta Energy Systems announce a breakthrough in the photovoltaic (PV) inverter industry with the release of Delta’s new generation of solar inverters, which utilize SiC power MOSFETs from Cree. The use of SiC MOSFETs in the next-generation PV inverters can enable significant new milestones in power density, efficiency and weight.

04/17/2013 

Intermolecular, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a multi-year technology development and IP licensing agreement with Micron Technology, Inc., focused on technology development and related IP for advanced memory technologies.

04/17/2013 

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are developing a novel technology that would facilitate close monitoring of structures for strain, stress and early formation of cracks.

04/17/2013 

BeSpoon, a fabless semiconductor company, and CEA-Leti have demonstrated an IR-UWB integrated circuit able to measure distances within a few centimeters’ accuracy, and have established a world-record operating range at 880m (standard regulation) and 3,641m (emergency situations).

04/16/2013 

Error correction code and redundant addresses are both techniques well-known in memories as a way of optimizing yield. But new data from the University of Ferrara shows that these common techniques may be overused. By classifying erratic bits more carefully, it’s possible to use less ECC and up to 35 percent less redundancy.

04/16/2013 

The ability of a resistive RAM device to maintain its resistance state, otherwise known as retention time, can be impacted by the electrode materials used.

04/16/2013 

New flash memory chips are replacing the floating gate with thin layers of material that "trap the charge." The charge trap is a sandwich of materials such as silicon-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (SONOS), metal-oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (MONOS) and tantalum-aluminum oxide-nitride-oxide-silicon (TANOS), all of which are substantially smaller than the floating gate.

04/16/2013 

At the International Reliability Physics Symposium (IRPS), being held April 14-18, 2013 at the Hyatt Regency Monterey Resort & Spa in Monterey, CA, imec will present new research focused on the stress induced breakdown between the tungsten trench local interconnects (M1, M2) and metal gate in a 28nm CMOS technology. Imec’s Thomas Kauerauf will present a paper titled “Reliability of MOL local interconnects.”

04/16/2013 

New finFETs feature high-k dielectrics, which are better than conventional silicon nitride dielectrics in that they can be thinner, yet still enable good control of the transistor’s channel region from the gate.

04/16/2013 

It’s well-known that transistors generate heat when they’re operating, and that can have a significant impact on the chip’s reliability and longterm longevity. A small increase of 10°C–15°C in the junction temperature may result in ? 2× reduction in the lifespan of the device.

04/16/2013 

FinFETs offer several advantages compared to traditional planar transistors, but it’s not yet clear what kind of new reliability problems might arise as FinFETs are scaled to smaller dimensions.

04/15/2013 

Anapass, Inc, a display SoC solution provider listed on the KOSDAQ, today announced that it has entered into strategic collaboration and investment agreements with GCT Semiconductor, Inc., a designer and supplier of advanced 4G mobile semiconductor solutions, to develop and commercialize mobile application processors (AP) for use in smartphones.