06/25/2002  Hillsboro, OR - FEI Co. has joined equipment suppliers Novellus Systems, Lam Research Corp., and SpeedFam-IPEC in the Damascus Alliance industry consortium, founded in 1998 to tackle the technology transition to copper dual damascene manufacturing.

06/25/2002  June 25, 2002 - Singapore - Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing has named Chia Song Hwee president and CEO. He also joins the company's board of directors.

06/25/2002 

06/24/2002  Asia's big chipmakers have been embracing metrology systems as technology changes come on stream, devices grow in complexity, and time-to-market pressures escalate.

06/24/2002  June 24, 2002 - Milpitas, CA, and Cambridge, England - Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Singapore, and ARM, a provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC processor technology, said that Chartered has joined the ARM Foundry Program.

06/24/2002  Quietly perking away in a small town in Switzerland is Mimotec, which expects to use income from sales of its micromachined metal parts to finance its current push into the microfluidic component market. In fact its CEO believes micromolds will be the company's best shot at the U.S. market.

06/24/2002  Princeton's Nanostructures Laboratory is on a roll, with two significant small tech advances announced in one week.

06/21/2002  The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency dedicated to the science of measurement, made it clear during an open house Thursday that it’s serious about measuring material on the nanoscale.

06/20/2002  San Jose, CA - Federal investigators have launched a criminal antitrust investigation of the $12 billion computer memory chip industry, issuing subpoenas to at least seven companies.

06/20/2002  June 20, 2002 - Migdal Haemek, Israel - Tower Semiconductor Ltd. has signed an agreement with a Japanese semiconductor manufacturer for the joint development of 0.18-micron embedded microFLASH technology.

06/20/2002  June 20, 2002 - San Diego, CA - JMAR Technologies Inc., a developer and provider of compact point-source, laser plasma lithography systems and sources, has received a contract for $5.3 million from the US Army Robert Morris Acquisition Center in Adelphi, MD, to finance the completion of the first of its integrated proprietary point-source laser plasma lithography systems.

06/20/2002  It is hard to imagine disruption of conventional wafer-to-tape mounting carriers used with wafer dicing in semiconductor assembly, but a newly patented wafer mounting technique (US patent 6,383,606, May 7, 2002) from Diamond Touch Technology Inc. (DTTI), Prescott Valley, AZ, brings a whole new set of capabilities and productivity to dicing and scribing.

06/19/2002  Memory chipmakers Micron Technology Inc., Boise ID, and Samsung Semiconductor Inc. of Seoul, Korea, have received subpoenas seeking information as part of a federal investigation into alleged anticompetitive practices, speculated to be dumping.

06/19/2002  June 19, 2002 - Sunnyvale, CA - AMD said that sales for its 2Q ending June 30 are anticipated to be within the $620 to $700 million range. At these depressed sales levels, the company anticipates a substantial operating loss for the quarter.

06/19/2002  June 19, 2002 - Santa Clara, CA - Applied Materials Inc. has introduced its new 300mm single-wafer Oasis Clean system.

06/17/2002  June 17, 2002 - Round Rock, TX - DuPont Photomasks Inc. has signed an agreement with Cypress Semiconductor Corp. to jointly develop advanced photomask technologies supporting the production of high-performance ICs.

06/17/2002  While securing grants and providing contract services to industrial firms have been the mainstay of revenue for Integrated Sensing Systems Inc. (ISSYS), this small tech company is staking its future economic success on the medical industry.

06/13/2002  June 13, 2002 - Menlo Park, CA - Boxer Cross Inc. has filed a counter-suit for patent infringement, trade secret misappropriation, and unfair competition against Therma-Wave Inc.

06/12/2002  June 12, 2002 - San Jose, CA - Samsung Semiconductor Inc. unveiled its first successful development of a next-generation wafer processing technology in which a hafnium dioxide-aluminum oxide laminate film is fabricated on the silicon wafer using Atomic Layer Deposition.

06/12/2002  Hsinchu, Taiwan - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said it's mulling a district in Shanghai as one of the possible locations for its first wafer fab in China.