04/19/2005  April 19, 2005 - Sematech has announced its top technical challenges for 2006, continuing to underscore advanced gate stack, 193nm immersion and EUV lithography, mask infrastructure, and low-k dielectrics with process compatibility. Consortium leaders also placed planar bulk transistor scaling on the list for the first time.

04/18/2005  TSMC preps 193nm immersion 'risk' production; others still see no technical showstoppers

By J. Robert Lineback

The first wave of production-worthy 193nm immersion scanners now appears to be a shoo-in for at least part of the 65nm process generation and probably the entire 45nm node at decade's end, but industry managers and researchers speaking at the annual SPIE International Symposium on Microlithography attempted to rein in some of the unbridled enthusiasm with...

04/15/2005 

04/14/2005  SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 13, 2005--Silicon Valley Technology Center (SVTC), a division of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., and American Semiconductor, Inc. (ASI), announced that ASI will be using SVTC's R&D manufacturing services to commercialize its Flexfet advanced Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) CMOS wafer fabrication process for manufacturing.

04/13/2005  April 13, 2005 - Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. will soon start to mass-produce 0.85-inch hard-disk drives, the world's smallest, to replace flash memories as the main storage medium for cellular phones, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported in its Tuesday evening edition.

04/13/2005  (April 13, 2005) Morris Township, N.J. — As part of its product portfolio for semiconductor manufacturing, Honeywell announces the availability of its "wafer-thinning materials," which will be produced at Honeywell's new Electronic Materials manufacturing site in Chandler, Ariz., as well as at their Seelze, Germany facility.

04/12/2005  April 12, 2005 - Mattson Technology Inc. has announced the shipment of an enhanced version of its Aspen III Highlands system to Sematech, Austin, TX. The 300mm system is being installed at ATDF, Sematech's R&D wafer fab, which also supports external customers.

04/12/2005 

04/07/2005  April 7, 2005 - The SEZ Group today announced that Elpida Memory Inc. has placed orders for multiple SEZ 323 spin processing tools.

04/06/2005  Georgy K. Vinogradov, Masaharu Takeda, FOI Corp., Kanagawa, Japan

Highly selective SiO₂ etching plasma processes increasingly are required in manufacturing of ultralarge scale integrated circuits, where deep etching of silicon oxide (oxide) layers involves fluorocarbon deposition. Such processes....MORE

04/06/2005  FLANDERS, NJ -- (MARKET WIRE) -- 04/05/2005 -- Rudolph Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of process control equipment for thin film measurement and macrodefect inspection during integrated circuit (IC) manufacturing, introduces the latest version of YieldView -- the yield management component of its WaferView Team for macrodefect inspection.

04/06/2005  April 6, 2005 - Japan's Elpida Memory Inc. plans to move the assembly and testing stages of memory chip production to two firms in Taiwan as early as fiscal 2007 in an effort to cut costs, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported.

04/05/2005 

04/04/2005  April 4, 2005 - Nikon Instruments Inc. has announced the integration of two high precision industrial metrology business units, Semiconductor Inspection, and Nexiv Vision Measuring Systems, under the SITECH Division located in Tempe, AZ. Two new departments have been established within the division: Vision Systems and Semiconductor Inspection.

04/01/2005  By Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor

A panel on strain engineering at the recent IEDM conference featured experts in favor of different approaches. The two take-aways representing the consensus, according to panel moderator Professor Scott Thompson of the U. of Florida, were that strain engineering is real, and that IC manufacturers should use all improvements possible using strain as long as they are additive.

04/01/2005  April 1, 2005 - Samsung Electronics will join the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) as the newest member of the consortium, effective today, ISMI officials announced. A subsidiary of SEMATECH, ISMI was formed last year to help chip manufacturers improve factory productivity and reduce cost/wafer, and ultimately cost/die.

04/01/2005  When measuring semiconductor features, recent industry developments illustrate that the linkage between metrology and contamination control is getting tighter as features shrink.

04/01/2005  EAST HILLS, N.Y.-On the heels of a recent market study indicating that Asia is driving-and will continue to drive over the next several years-the cleanrooms hardware and garment market, filtration/purification developer Pall Corp. (www.pall.com) has opened a new manufacturing facility in Beijing, China, and has named Jon Weiner the first president of Pall Microelectronics Asia.

04/01/2005  People concerned with contamination control certainly know a lot about such things as cleanrooms, barrier isolators, minienvironments, fume hoods and glove boxes.

04/01/2005  PALO ALTO, Calif.-Rapid advancements in the IC industry, says a report by industry research firm Frost & Sullivan (www.frost.com), are prompting increased demand for new or improved front-end semiconductor manufacturing technologies, such as wafer cleaning and thin-layer deposition.