01/10/2010 

01/08/2010 

Fabless giant Qualcomm has made two deals to reserve leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing capacity: one with longtime partner TSMC, and the other with upstart GlobalFoundries.

01/06/2010 

Scientists at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) are asking industry to come up with new ways of designing integrated circuits for affordable, low-volume nanofabrication for US Department of Defense (DOD) applications.

01/04/2010 

Hui-Jung Wu, et al., from Novellus discuss process developments and mechanisms of improving electromigration reliability, a growing concern for copper interconnects at advanced technology nodes.

01/04/2010 

Toshiba and Elpida Memory are opening their wallets again to increase capacity as demand rises, and also keep pace with market-leading Samsung, according to a local report.

12/31/2009 

Silicon circuit board (SiCB) technology allows bare-die FPGAs, CPUs, and memory to be placed together on a single silicon substrate. Embedded computing modules using SiCB offer better performance than FR-4 material -- notably 22% reduced power consumption in a typical system, reports David Blaker from siXis Inc.

12/28/2009 

A flexible, forward-thinking platform will be vital to meet cost and productivity challenges of 450mm and beyond. John Klawender and Terry Bluck from Intevac describe the concept and capabilities of a universal platform, with test and system modeling results.

12/22/2009 

Nagesh Vodrahalli, VP of technology & manufacturing at Allvia, discussed some of the issues in developing through-silicon via (TSV) technologies with Solid State Technology/Advanced Packaging in conjunction with his presentation at the recent 3-D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging conference.

12/21/2009 

Semiconductor manufacturing equipment demand slowed a bit in November but still kept up a pace of growth, lending more weight to the outlook for improved fab spending heading into 2010, according to the latest data from SEMI and SEAJ.

12/18/2009 

Microbridging defects have emerged as one of the top yield detractors in immersion lithography at the 32nm node and beyond. This study from Entegris, IMEC, and Sokudo examines the effect of point-of-use filtration and how it is best used to mitigate microbridging defectivity.

12/15/2009 

ASM International NV has licensed key processes and material IP to the Air Liquide Group, related to deposition of advanced ultra-high-k insulator films such as yttrium-doped zirconia, STO, and BST, used most recently as gate insulator material in logic manufacturing.

12/15/2009 

Researchers at Stanford disclosed their latest work at this year's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) on combining carbon nanotubes (CNT) and logic circuits to devise new techniques for preventing flaws and building multilayer chip prototypes. The transistors are said to be grouped in the same "cascading" sequences as for computational logic and memory, with processes compatible with standard industrial-scale VLSI (very large scale integration) manufacturing.

12/14/2009 

NEC Electronics disclosed two areas of work at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM): a low-resistance copper interconnects with partially thickened local structure (PTL) to address resisitivity increases (and thus RF performance) in analog conductors, and high-threshold voltage-control gallium nitride (GaN) power transistors on a silicon substrate.

12/14/2009 

The latest semiconductor capital spending forecast from Gartner solidifies the 2009 outlook with another positive bump-up, and the firm sees the climate significantly improving for almost all sectors well into the future. Gartner research VP Dean Freeman helps SST break down some of the numbers.

12/10/2009 

SUSS MicroTec will collaborate with SEMATECH’s FEP device and reliability experts to investigate complex semiconductor probing and measurement solutions for next-generation semiconductor and emerging technologies.

12/09/2009 

Mike Mayberry, VP of Intel's technology and manufacturing group, offers SST a summary of the company's presentations at this week's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Baltimore focused on using III-V materials in leading-edge transistors, with some record-breaking achievements in drive current and peak transconductance.

12/09/2009 

At this week's International Electronics Devices Meeting (IEDM) in Baltimore, Toshiba has disclosed a new process step that can push bulk CMOS to the 20nm node; and the first fabrication with verified stable performance of a spintronics-based MOSFET cell.

12/08/2009 

At this week's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), IMEC has debuted a new GaN-on-Si double heterostructure field-effect transistor (FET) device offering low leakage and high breakdown voltage to help reduce power loss in high-power switching applications.

12/08/2009 

Scaling will continue to follow the Moore's Law pace and will continue to rely on silicon to the 11nm node and beyond, although the emergence of fully depleted devices will disrupt device architectures, predicted Ghavam Shahidi from IBM research division, in a talk at this week's International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM).

12/07/2009 

Ten equipment and materials suppliers have received top nods from top foundry Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) for contributions over the past year.