03/07/2007  Samsung backs Advanced Micro-Fabrication Equipment Inc.

03/06/2007  Progress in water immersion exposure technology since last year's SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium has been so convincing that its insertion into manufacturing at the 55nm and 45nm generations (as reported by Toshiba, STMicro, and others) is not likely to be interrupted. However, the consensus today is that some evolutionary step has to be taken to extend immersion technology and keep up with Moore's law -- and double patterning technology seems to be the step that will take us to 32nm.

03/06/2007  The prominence of a dedicated joint session and a panel discussion on "computational lithography" at this year's SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium -- not to mention ASML's recent $270M purchase of Brion Technologies -- illustrate the growing importance of resolution enhancement tricks that have made it possible to approach the 45nm node using an exposure wavelength four times larger. Making sure that those tricks actually work before fabricating complex masks has become crucial.

03/06/2007  March 6, 2007 - AmberWave Systems Corp., a developer of strained silicon IP, and Intel Corp. have settled back-and-forth litigation ongoing since 2005, with the companies now agreeing to a 10-year licensing deal.

03/06/2007  March 6, 2007 - TSMC and customer Nvidia say they have produced functional 65nm embedded DRAM verified "first time right," targeting the technology at digital consumer/gaming devices, multimedia processors, and high-end networking.

03/06/2007  March 6, 2007 - Singapore foundry Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing says it's still on track to meet its expected financial benchmarks for 1Q07: revenue of $321-$327 million, down about 3.5%-5.5% from December, according to execs.

03/06/2007  February 28, 2007 -- /BUSINESS WIRE/ -- SAN JOSE, Calif. -- SEMATECH's program in developing solutions for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) infrastructure has brought the technology out of proof-of-feasibility and into the realm of identifying manufacturing challenges, participants at the annual SPIE Advanced Lithography conferences learned here yesterday.

03/05/2007  March 5, 2007 - Elpida Memory Inc. and Toshiba Corp. make up the remainder of a $105 million private equity investment in Taiwan chip assembler PowerTech Technology Inc., according to the Taiwan Economic News.

03/05/2007  March 5, 2007 - Worldwide sales of semiconductors remain on pace at 9% year-on-year growth, though they were also down ~1% from December along seasonal norms, according to data from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

03/02/2007  March 2, 2007 - Confirming rumors and expectations, Intel Corp. says it has indeed leading a round of investments in Taiwan chip assembly firm Powertech Inc., one of the chipmaker's largest investments in Asia to date.

03/02/2007  Two of Taiwan's top DRAM makers, Inotera Memories and Nanya Technologies, are eyeing plans to issue hundreds of millions in corporate bonds and syndicated loans to help fund planned capacity increases, according to local reports.

03/02/2007  March 2, 2007 - Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. says it has ramped to mass production of 1Gb DDR2 DRAM using 60nm process technologies, which it says offers 40% production efficiencies vs. 80nm shrinks the company has deployed since early 2006.

03/02/2007  March 2, 2007 - Israel metrology equipment provider Nova Measuring Instruments Ltd. says it has agreed to a $5 million private placement of nearly 2 million shares by a group of several investors.

03/02/2007  Samsung begins mass production of 60-nm memory chips

03/01/2007  February 28, 2007 - SEMATECH has named Micron Technology Inc. to its International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) roster, while reportedly saying goodbye to member Freescale Semiconductor.

03/01/2007  March 1, 2007 - Singapore Technologies Semiconductors Pte. Ltd. (STS), a subsidiary of state-owned holding firm Temasek Holdings Ltd., has filed a $1.6 billion cash offer to acquire full ownership in backend services firm Stats ChipPAC.

03/01/2007  Stan Williams and his colleague Greg Snider at HP Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., have completed research that could lead to making field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) up to 8x denser-while using less energy for a given computation-than those currently being produced.

03/01/2007  Freescale was recently honored with a product award for its magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) product, the Freescale MR2A16ATS35C 4-Mbit MRAM.

03/01/2007  Small tech for food safety applications, a high-voltage CMOS process with embedded flash, an interstellar compass, and more…

03/01/2007  System-on-chip (SoC) is a concept that has been proposed and, to some extent, introduced into the electronics marketplace.