10/02/2007  October 1, 2007 - Taiwan's Mosel Vitelic Inc. has signed a five-year, $190 million deal to receive multicrystalline solar wafers from Chinese firm LDK Solar, in the Taiwan firm's first big (and public) solar-cell materials procurement deal. Deliveries are slated to start next year.

10/01/2007  Deep etching equipment is about to make a big jump in throughput. Franz Laermer of Robert Bosch GmbH, inventor of the widely used Bosch process for deep reactive ion etching, told SST partner Nikkei Microdevices how faster volume production speeds will not only bring down the costs of MEMS devices to expand their use in consumer applications and wafer-level packaging, but will also make production of 3D interconnect with through-silicon vias practical.

10/01/2007  October 1, 2007 - Korean memory chipmaker Hynix Semiconductor Inc. has licensed phase-change memory technology from Ovonyx Inc., and the firm will actively support Hynix's own internal development of PCM products, the companies announced.

10/01/2007  Tightening supplies and better pricing in NAND flash memory drove a nice spike in overall chip sales in August, according to data from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), which showed Asia ramping up again, but the US still behind the curve.

09/28/2007  September 28, 2007 - Hynix plans to hike output of >1Gb DRAM to 60% of its total DRAMs by year's end, after ceasing DRAM chip sales in spot markets in an effort to step still-falling prices.

09/28/2007  September 28, 2007 - Oki Electric Industry Ltd. has agreed to sell its wireless design center to India's Wipro Technologies in an undisclosed all-cash deal, in order to focus on its core design capabilities. Wipro also will set up a dedicated development center for Oki.

09/27/2007  September 27, 2007 - SanDisk Corp. has opened its flash memory assembly/test plant in Shanghai's Zizhu Science Park, its first production facility in China, which will focus on system-in-package chips, and is expected to meet approximately 30% of projected global demand for SanDisk's SiP products, the company said in a statement.

09/27/2007  At a one-day technical symposium on Sept. 20 sponsored by the IEEE and Applied Materials, a standing-room-only crowd of technologists learned about the leading-edge of manufacturing the densest, fastest, cheapest IC memories. The take-away theme: the two trains of DRAM and flash memory technologies have long "left the station" and unless and until they stop, other promising technologies such as phase-change (PRAM) and magneto-resistance (MRAM) will be relegated to niche applications.

09/27/2007  SUSS MicroTec, NEXX Systems, and Surface Technology Systems (STS) will collaborate with Fraunhofer IZM in a series of seminars to demonstrate integrated processes for 3-D wafer level packaging.

09/26/2007  September 26, 2007 - Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) say they've come up with a new "cold zone" annealing technique that processes block copolymers and other thin films to align into regular patterns of nanocylinder lines, which when chemically removed offer a pattern template for building advanced microstructures.

09/26/2007  September 26, 2007 - A US District Court in Northern California has ruled that TSMC did in fact misuse trade secrets concerning embedded DRAM allegedly shared with it by UniRAM Technology, and ordered the Taiwan foundry giant to pay $30.5 million.

09/26/2007  September 26, 2007 - A current upswing in memory and electronic equipment can't offset what was a horrid performance in the first six months of the year, according to iSuppli Corp., which has again shaved its outlook for 2007 chip sales to just 3.5% growth, from expectations of 6% growth back in June. But the firm emphasizes that the worst is well behind the industry, and growth in 2008 should be a little better than anticipated.

09/25/2007  FlipChip International (FCI) announced the appointment of David McComb as global vice president, sales and marketing for its wafer level packaging (WLP) and bumping business. McComb, who joined FCI in 2005 as the director of European business and sales, will assume responsibilities for sales, marketing, and licensing for FCI's activities for international customers.

09/25/2007  Building on its relationships with partners PDF Solutions, Ponte Solutions, and Brion Technologies, Pyxis Technology launched its Nexus Solution Suite on Sept. 25, having matured the product through implementation on 60 different designs, and working with a number of IC manufacturers including AMD and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing.

09/25/2007  September 25, 2007 - NOR flash memory firm Spansion Inc. has named Donald Lucas as its chairman, a role vacated by AMD top exec Hector Ruiz, and added Gilled Delfassy to its board of directors.

09/25/2007  The growing role that solid-state drives, which use NAND flash memory to store digital data, are playing in the storage market, was the subject of much discussion at the IDEMA DISKCON 2007 conference (9/19-20). Samsung, for one, is upbeat for new applications as costs decline and densities soar, and has big plans to cut costs further. However, the fact is that disk drives are still the storage technology of choice -- and the rise of consumer demand is actually helping HDDs as much as flash.

09/21/2007  September 21, 2007 - Taiwan's second-tier foundries' production capacities are overflowing with contracts to fill demand for areas like power MOSFETs and analog chips, and production is likely to remain at full capacity for the next two months, according to the Taiwan Economic News.

09/21/2007  September 21, 2007 - Samsung Electronics says another "brief" power outage at its K2 production line in its Giheung facility lasted about half a minute, but there was no damage. An automatic system switched on immediately and all lines continued operating normally, a spokesperson told the Korea Times, calling the glitch "a minor technical problem."

09/21/2007  Analysts presenting at a SEMI breakfast panel on Sept. 19 reviewed changes reshaping the chipmaking and equipment industries, agreeing on several fronts such as progress in production efficiencies and an increasingly consumer-reliant future. But there was plenty of room for debate about the real growth possible in certain new markets (e.g. photovoltaics), and what the sum of all these parts means for investors.

09/21/2007  ChipSensors Ltd. has unveiled a chip whose surface can sense parameters such as temperature, humidity, certain gases, and pathogens. The fabless startup, which is working on commercialization, says its technology overcomes traditional obstacles in sensor manufacturing.