07/11/2018  Overspending by the major NAND suppliers expected to further cool NAND flash prices this year.

07/11/2018  The importance of data gathered and analysed in the subfab – the place where vacuum pumps, abatements systems and other supporting equipment operates – is growing. Increasingly, manufacturers are finding that these systems have a direct impact on yield, safety, cost-of-ownership and ultimately capacity and cycle time.

07/11/2018  As the commercial IC fabrication industry continues to shrink field-effect transistor (FET) sizes, 2D planar structures evolved into 3D fins which are now evolving into 3D stacks of 2D nano-sheets.

07/11/2018  Many new innovations were discussed at imec’s U.S. International Technology Forum (ITF) on Monday at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, sub-3nm logic, memory computing, solid-state batteries, EUV, RF and photonics, but perhaps the most interesting was new technology that enables human cells, tissues and organs to be grown and analyzed on-chip.

07/11/2018  Intel has won SEMI's 2018 Award for the Americas. SEMI honored the celebrated chipmaker for pioneering process and integration breakthroughs that enabled the first high-volume Integrated Silicon Photonics Transceiver. The award was presented yesterday at SEMICON West 2018.

07/11/2018  SEMI yesterday honored two industry leaders at SEMICON West 2018 for their outstanding accomplishments in developing Standards for the electronics and related industries.

07/10/2018  To keep up with Moore's Law, the semiconductor industry continues to push the envelope in developing new device architectures containing novel materials.

07/10/2018  This year’s Scaling Technologies TechXPOT at SEMICON West (Scaling Every Which Way! – Thursday, July 12, 2:00PM-4:00PM) will provide an update on the evolution of scaling and describe how the various players (foundry, IDM, fabless, and application developers) are jockeying for innovation leadership.

07/10/2018  Multi-Trigger chemistry, which is designed specifically for EUV, creates a high-chemical gradient at pattern boundaries, significantly reducing blurring and improving line-edge roughness to reduce the RLS trade off.

07/10/2018  There's an old proverb that the shoemaker's children always go barefoot, indicating how some professionals don't apply their skills for themselves. Until lately, that has seemed the case with the semiconductor manufacturing industry which has been good at collecting massive amounts of data, but no so good at analyzing that data and using it to improve efficiency, boost yield and reduce costs.

07/10/2018  Increasingly complicated 3D structures such finFETs and 3D NAND require very high aspect ratio etches. This, in turn, calls for higher gas flow rates to improve selectivity and profile control. Higher gas flow rates also mean higher etch rates, which help throughput, and  higher rates of removal for etch byproducts.

07/10/2018  The semiconductor industry is collecting massive amounts of data from fab equipment and other sources. But is the trend toward using that data in a Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0 approach happening fast enough in what Mike Plisinski, CEO of Rudolph Technologies, calls a "very conservative" chip manufacturing sector?

07/10/2018  SEMI today announced the re-election of 10 current members to the SEMI International Board of Directors in accordance with the association's by-laws.

07/10/2018  Industry R&D consortium imec runs a series of technology forums around the world, starting in June in Antwerp, Belgium, and including a stop in July in San Francisco in coordination with SEMICON West.

07/09/2018  Increasingly, the ability to stay on the path defined my Moore's Law will depend on advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration, including photonics integration.

07/09/2018  The semiconductor industry is facing key challenges. In recent years, M&A mega deals have led to consolidations within the market, while the industry continues to mature.

07/09/2018  Process-induced overlay errors from outside the litho cell have become a significant contributor to the overlay error budget including non-uniform wafer stress.

07/09/2018  To eliminate voids, it is important to control the process to minimize moisture absorption and optimize a curing profile for die attach materials.

07/09/2018  The development of a new class of materials with superior functionalities is essential to enable emerging process schemes for wafer- or panel-level FO packaging.

07/09/2018  Market shares of semiconductor equipment manufacturers shifted significantly in Q1 2018 as Applied Materials, the top supplier dropped, according to the report “Global Semiconductor Equipment: Markets, Market Shares, Market Forecasts,” recently published by The Information Network.