03/11/2003  March 11, 2003 - Geneva, Switzerland - STMicroelectronics will invest more than $200 million in Singapore over the next three years to increase its production capacity.

03/10/2003  A small Minnesota company hopes to make conventional electronic memory, well, a thing of the past. NVE Corp. is designing devices that use spintronics to store information. The technique promises to shrink products to a new scale while creating always-on electronic components for military, biomedical, environmental and consumer devices.

03/07/2003  MARCH 7--SAN DIEGO, Calif.--Cymer, Inc., a supplier of excimer light sources used in semiconductor manufacturing, has opened a chamber refurbishment facility in South Korea's Eoyeon-Hansan Industrial Park.

03/06/2003  March 6, 2003 - Seoul, Korea - Chip foundry Dongbu Electronics said it will initiate capital spending of 300 billion won (US$252.04 million) for its plant in Eumseong, North Chungcheong Province, later this month.

03/06/2003  March 6, 2003 - Villach, Austria - The SEZ Group has taken steps to refocus its resources on single-wafer wet surface preparation technology. This move includes the closing of its wet bench production facility in Donaueschingen, Germany, which was acquired by the SEZ Group in February 2001.

03/06/2003  March 6, 2003 - San Jose, CA - The Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA), has announced the results of its annual "Wafer Supply & Demand and Packaging Survey", with analysis provided by Gartner Dataquest and conducted in conjunction with PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP.

03/05/2003  History has been harsh on the German city of Dresden. Allied firebombing nearly wiped it off the map during World War II. And like the rest of the area that once was East Germany, it has suffered great economic hardship since German reunification. But the new century is giving Dresden another chance, and small tech is playing no small part in the city's rise from the ashes.

03/04/2003  Buy low. It's a time-honored strategy being followed by NeoPhotonics, a California-based nano-optics firm that is taking advantage of the optical components slump to buy up good technology on the cheap. Its latest quarry is Lightwave Systems. “This gives us both the broadest and deepest photonic capability in the industry for making optical circuits,” says NeoPhotonics' CEO.

03/03/2003  March 3, 2003 - Chandler, AZ - Amkor Technology Inc. has completed the sale of its wafer fabrication services business to Korean-based Anam Semiconductor Inc. (ASI) for $62 million.

03/03/2003  Fired Bell Laboratories researcher Jan Hendrik Schon’s fall from grace continues months after investigators concluded his molecular electronics studies contained fabricated data. Two independent efforts to replicate Schon’s self-assembled monolayer field effect transistors failed to produce working devices, the journal Nano Letters reported, suggesting there is little to salvage from what was considered hallmark findings in 2001.

03/01/2003  While current economic conditions will affect all aspects of the semiconductor industry, the impact on the embedded field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) market should be minimal, according to In-Stat/MDR.

03/01/2003  Traditional packaging, as we know it, is beginning to change. I have always divided packaging into either integrated circuit (IC) or systems packaging.

03/01/2003 

02/27/2003  Feb. 27, 2003 - Crolles, France - Jacques Chirac, president of the French Republic, inaugurated the Crolles2 Alliance facility in Crolles near Grenoble, France. The R&D center, owned by STMicroelectronics (ST), Motorola, and Philips, will pioneer CMOS technology from 90nm processes to 32nm over the next five years and also includes a 300mm wafer semiconductor manufacturing pilot line, which is now beginning operation.

02/27/2003  Feb. 27, 2003 - Seoul, Korea - Samsung Electronics Co. will invest 305 billion won (US$295.54 million) in memory-chip producing facilities during the first half of this year to meet increasing demand, the company said.

02/27/2003  Feb. 27, 2003 - Santa Clara, CA - Numerical Technologies Inc. has signed a joint development agreement with Applied Materials Inc. to address resolution enhancement technologies (RETs) for 193nm lithography processes.

02/27/2003  Feb. 27, 2003 - Hsinchu, Taiwan - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing (TSMC) has become the first Taiwanese chipmaker to win approval to begin investing in a fabrication plant in China.

02/26/2003  FEB. 26--NORWALK, Conn.--Arch Microelectronic Materials and its joint venture partner, Fuji Photo Film, are upgrading a new cleanroom with 193-nanometer tools to support advanced and next-generation photoresist product development and manufacturing.

02/25/2003  From the Love Boat to the kids' aquarium, two small tech companies are sinking money into waterborne nanomaterials that can sponge away everything from annoying algae to harmful bacteria. EnviroSystems' EcoTru cleans cruise ships, while Altair's NanoCheck prevents algae growth.

Automated micro-defect monitoring for 300mm lithography

02/24/2003  By: Kay Lederer, Infineon Technologies SC300, Dresden, Germany
Barry Saville, Ingrid Peterson, KLA-Tencor, San Jose, CA

As the semiconductor industry continues to push toward the 90nm node, controlling defect density in the lithography cell becomes ever more critical to the success of the overall manufacturing process. MORE