01/31/2012 

The global semiconductor market will see a slow 2012, reports IHS, with economic uncertainty and semiconductor inventory not moving enough to stimulate new production. Expect negative growth in Q1 2012, a nascent rebound in Q2, and strong growth in Q3 2012, IHS reports.

01/30/2012 

Luxtera is teaming up with the new foundry service for Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS), making Luxtera’s Silicon CMOS Photonics device library and process open to the OpSIS community, which shares the cost of fabricating complex chip-scale systems across many projects.

01/30/2012 

Tilera launched its 36 and 16-core TILE-Gx 64-bit processors with low power consumption and high performance. The chips increase the number of cores on one die, without complicated redesigns, and are Tilera's first 40nm design.

01/27/2012 

Texas Instruments (TI, NASDAQ:TXN) will close 2 older semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Hiji, Japan and Houston, TX over the course of the next 18 months. Production from these analog chip sites will be moved to more advanced TI facilities.

01/27/2012 

President Barack Obama visited the Intel Ocotillo campus in Chandler, AZ. The President spoke about Intel's technological innovation, and manufacturing jobs in America.

01/27/2012 

While Apple's release of the iPhone 4S in Q4 2011 "unleashed tremendous pent-up demand" from consumers, Samsung used its broad range of smartphones to take the top spot, reports IHS.

01/26/2012 

NIST materials scientists modified a standard SEM for a roughly 10-fold improvement in measuring the crystal structure of nanoparticles and extremely thin films. It enables crystal structure study of particles as small as 10nm.

01/26/2012 

ABB Robotics introduced an ISO 5 (Class 100) Cleanroom version of the IRB 120, its smallest multipurpose 6-axis robot. Any source materials in the IRB 120 prone to particle generation were modified to eliminate contamination potential in the manufacturing area.

01/26/2012 

Soitec joined SEMATECH's Front End Processes and Advanced Metrology Programs, bringing SOI wafers and other advanced engineered wafers into the group to work on new processes and technologies enabling high-performance, low-power IC applications.

01/26/2012 

Test Advantage Capital Group, a business of BSE Group, surpassed $150M in its portfolio of semiconductor manufacturing equipment under management. Boston Semi Equipment's fab equipment leasing business also received a $100M annual commitment from its financial backer, Wafra Capital Partners.

01/25/2012 

Heidelberg Instruments launched the µPG 501 table-top direct-write lithography system for prototyping MEMS, integrated optics, microfluidic/lab-on-a-chip, and other devices as well as mask production.

01/25/2012 

The late-2011 flooding in Thailand caused major disruptions in the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing communities, most acutely felt in hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturing. FBR Capital Markets provides this update on Thai HDD production.

01/25/2012 

UC Riverside researchers identified the "Higgs boson" property of bilayer graphene: when the electrons come close to 0, BLG becomes insulating. This spontaneous symmetry breaking is the same principle that endows mass for particles in high energy physics.

01/24/2012 

The USPTO is looking to increase the diversity of honorees for its annual National Medal of Technology and Innovation (NMTI), honoring "this nation's creative geniuses."

01/24/2012 

Leading electronic equipment manufacturers accounted for $105.6 billion of semiconductors on a design TAM basis in 2011, 35% of semiconductor vendors' worldwide chip revenue, according to Gartner. Apple bought the most, spending $17,257 million.

01/24/2012 

Si-Ware Systems debuted the SiMOST platform to fab and package single-chip optical systems with validated MEMS components. Multiple MOEMS structures can be patterned and etched on SOI wafers using DRIE. The structures are then wafer-level packaged and diced.

01/24/2012 

Core Wafer Systems, subsidiary of Action Products International, upgraded its PDQ-WLR on-wafer accelerated reliability product line to version 7.0, designed specifically for Agilent Technologies' Parametric Testers.

01/23/2012 

Silex Microsystems joined Energy-efficient Piezo-MEMS Tunable RF Front-End Antenna Systems for Mobile Devices to develop TSVs, PZT thin films, and other technologies for high-performance RF systems targeting mobile devices.

01/23/2012 

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.16 billion in orders in December 2011, $1.32 billion in billings, and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.88, according to SEMI. The book-to-bill ratio has been climbing since September 2011. In December, bookings climbed back above the $1 billion mark.

01/23/2012 

IMS Nanofabrication, Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. (DNP), Intel Corporation, and Photronics Inc. are commencing a joint electron multi?beam mask writer tool collaboration.