04/05/2010 

Updating outlooks for foundry rivals TSMC and UMC, FBR Research analyst Mehdi Hosseini suggests that business will stay brisk through year's end -- and that the leading-edge horizon is clear of trouble for the top foundry.

03/26/2010 

TSMC has officially broken ground for its new LED lighting R&D center and fab in Taiwan's Hsinchu Science Park, part of its multibillion-dollar initiative to establish a foothold in higher-growth markets outside of core IC fabrication.

03/26/2010 

A brief power outage at Samsung Electronics appears to have caused "minimal" damage and internal impact on memory production, but may briefly inflate prices until markets know for sure, according to multiple reports.

03/24/2010 

After delaying its initial plans, Toshiba has rejuvenated its Fab 5 NAND flash memory project, aiming to start construction in July of this year and be online by the spring of 2011 -- more than doubling its capacity to an eye-popping 500,000 wafers/month.

03/23/2010 

Amid efforts to keep afloat as the industry tides recover, Tegal Corp. has sold off much of its technology portfolio to the OEM Group, and is poised to forge on with DRIE and certain deposition technologies.

03/22/2010 

The semiconductor industry is at its most profitable point now than any other time in the past decade thanks to industrywide efforts to aggressively manage costs and capacity -- but wild optimism about surging growth forgets the truth that this recovery only resets to levels from three years ago, according to iSuppli.

03/17/2010 

Substantial amounts of electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage are not only possible, but probable in semiconductor die attach operations, leading to substantial yield losses. Roger Peirce and Brad Williford from Simco illustrate seven distinct mechanisms in typical die attach operations that cause electrostatic discharge (ESD) damage to chips being handled.

03/15/2010 

Military microelectronics experts at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are launching a leap-ahead technology program to develop advanced, ultralow-power non-volatile logic ICs that retain their data and computational states when power is removed.

03/12/2010 

The light-emitting diode (LED) market has gone through two cycles of major growth, but an even bigger "third cycle" based on super-efficient lighting looms ahead, reports SST's Bob Haavind from a recent SEMI breakfast at Teradyne near Boston on March 10. And the wide range of problems to be tackled will make it an attractive target for those now in the semiconductor processing markets.

03/12/2010 

Checks into key chipmakers in Korea and Taiwan suggest current demand for equipment is still on the rise, with planned capex increases imminent and capacities set to increase into 2011, according to one industry analyst.

03/10/2010 

X-Fab says it has come up with an embedded nonvolatile memory process that combines the benefits of quickly accessible SRAM with nonvolatile data retention of EEPROM or flash memory, achieving same or better functionality using significantly less chip area.

03/09/2010 

Novellus Systems (NASDAQ: NVLS) created an advanced copper barrier-seed physical vapor deposition (PVD) process for the emerging through-silicon-via (TSV) packaging market. The process uses Novellus’ established INOVA platform with patented hollow cathode magnetron (HCM) technology to produce highly conformal copper seed films that are reportedly four times thinner than the conventional PVD seed approaches used for TSV applications. Novellus announced that the HCM TSV process delivers excellent sidewall and bottom coverage, and enables void-free copper fill during the subsequent TSV electroplating step.

03/09/2010 

Entegris execs summarize two poster papers from the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference that covered the company's methods to detect ppt levels of trimethylsilanol (TMS), and evaluating microbridging defects in which 5nm filtration was compared to 3nm filtration levels.

03/09/2010 

Elpida Memory reportedly is purchasing Spansion's NAND flash memory operations, with the goal to produce modules that package DRAM and flash memory targeting mobile devices such as smart phones, according to multiple reports.

03/09/2010 

What is nanotechnology -- or more importantly, what is it that nanotechnology uniquely provides to the community of nanomaterials developers? The answer is an exploitation of size as an independent, fourth degree of freedom, explains Nicholas V. Coppa of Nanomaterials Company.

03/09/2010 

Last week's 6.4-magnitude earthquake in Taiwan caused some emergency evacuations and shutdowns among the island's electronics manufacturing sector, with the biggest impact so far seeming to be in the LCD manufacturing sector.

03/08/2010 

Based on talks and presentations from the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, the future for IC manufacturing is still very much unclear, writes Griff Resor. How close is optical litho to finally reaching its limits? Has the time has come to switch to a replacement technology like EUV, and what still needs to be accomplished?

03/08/2010 

Worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending is projected to surpass $29.4 billion in 2010, a 76.1% increase from 2009 spending of $16.7 billion, according to Gartner Inc. Gartner cites a dramatic recovery in semiconductor orders for the equipment order surge.

03/05/2010 

The biggest chipmaker spenders are taking an extra few crumbs from the capex pie plate in 2010, spending far more than the industry average -- but in the end IC prices will still go up and shortages will happen before the year is through, according to IC Insights.

03/03/2010 

Toppan Photomask's Franklin Kalk handicaps the litho field, mapping their abilities and potential to professional baseball teams as the new season approaches. (And yes, it comes down to the Red Sox and Yankees.)