10/25/2001  October 25, 2001 - San Jose, CA, and Round Rock, TX - KLA-Tencor Corp. and DuPont Photomasks Inc. have completed beta testing of KLA-Tencor's TeraStar SLF27 reticle inspection tool at DuPont Photomasks' Round Rock facility, two additional TeraStar tools have been ordered. In addition to the system in Round Rock, new tools are being installed at DuPont Photomasks Taiwan and the DPI Reticle Technology Center, a photomask R&D facility.

10/25/2001  October 25, 2001 - Hsinchu, Taiwan - Republic of China President Chen Shui-bian visited the newest manufacturing operations of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in the southern city of Tainan.

10/24/2001  October 24, 2001 - Chelmsford and Billerica, MA - Brooks Automation and PRI Automation have announced a definitive agreement under which Brooks will acquire PRI Automation, creating the leading supplier of semiconductor automation systems, software and services, with pro forma annual sales for fiscal year 2001 (ended September 30, 2001) of approximately $700 million.

10/22/2001  October 22, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Altis Semiconductor, the joint venture of IBM and Infineon located in Corbeil-Essonnes, France, has selected Applied Materials' single-wafer SiNgen LPCVD (low pressure chemical vapor deposition) system to deposit critical silicon nitride films in the transistor region of its most advanced logic chips.

10/22/2001 

After billions of dollars in investments -- followed by an economy heading for recession -- MEMS optical switch startups are about to be tested by the market.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Murray Hill, NJ - Scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs report that they have created organic transistors with a single-molecule channel length, which they say will set the stage for a new class of high-speed, inexpensive carbon-based electronics.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Geneva, Switzerland - STMicroelectronics plans to close its Rancho Bernardo 6-inch front-end wafer fabrication production and transfer the fab's products, processes and equipment to ST's manufacturing facilities in Carrollton, TX, and Singapore. Three hundred and thirty employees will be affected.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - At last month's Intel RosettaNet Interoperability Fest (IOF), 26 supply chain trading partners and 13 e-business solution providers exchanged Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents using RosettaNet e-business standards.

10/18/2001  October 18, 2001 - Shanghai, China - Applied Materials Inc. marked the opening of the company's major new facility and technical training center in the Pudong Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, Shanghai.

10/18/2001  October 18, 2001 - Hillsboro, OR - TriQuint Semiconductor Inc. announced the introduction of the TQM7136 SiGe HBT Cell-Band CDMA Power Amplifier Module.

10/17/2001  It's just possible that things may be getting so bad that the industry may be forced into rethinking long-standing practices and come up with some better ways of doing business.

10/16/2001  October 16, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - The continuing low visibility of global DRAM prospects and the lack of abundant funds has forced ProMos Technologies, a DRAM manufacturing venture between Mosel Vitelic Inc. and Germany-based Infineon Technologies AG, to delay its planned capital expenditures on a 300mm wafer fab.

10/16/2001  October 16, 2001 - San Jose, CA - Altera Corp. launched its Excalibur System Development Kit to give embedded designers all the necessary software and hardware support they need to develop system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) designs with the widely adopted ARM9T 32-bit processor core.

10/16/2001  October 16, 2001 - Veldhoven, Netherlands - As a consequence of the continuing downturn in the semiconductor industry, ASML Holding NV (ASML) will accelerate integration with its newly merged Silicon Valley Group in the US and will further reduce its global work force by approximately 1,400 positions (17%), compared with today's work force of 8,000. This will result in a total work force of 6,600 by the end of the 1H02.

10/15/2001  October 15, 2001 - Paris, France - Motorola and CEA-Leti, a department of CEA (Atomic Energy Commission of France), an R&D laboratory for MEMS products and technologies, have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and industrialize the next generation of surface micro-machined linear inertial sensors.

10/15/2001  October 15, 2001 - San Jose, CA - LSI Logic Corp. announced the second generation of its ZSP digital signal processor (DSP) architecture at the 2001 Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, CA.

10/15/2001  October 15, 2001 - Villach, Austria - SEZ Group has broken ground on the expansion of its wet bench facility in Donaueschingen, Germany. The expansion is a key part of the company's worldwide wet bench strategy, as SEZ said the new facility will enable it to produce 300mm wet bench equipment and extend the company's sales capabilities outside of Europe.

10/12/2001  October 12, 2001 - Tokyo, Japan - Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. will form a technical alliance to develop next-generation silicon wafers expected to improve the processing speed and energy efficiency of semiconductors, sources at the companies said.

10/12/2001  October 12, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - Winbond Electronics Corp. is postponing its plan to build a 300mm silicon wafer fab, according to The Financial Times. The company insists that it will not cancel the plan, but will concentrate on developing good products with existing facilities.

10/12/2001  Important lessons can be learned about the current and future state of the semiconductor industry by looking at historical cycles, according to IC Insights, Scottsdale, AZ. The research firm compared Cycle 3 (1983 - 1984) to the current Cycle 6 (1999 - 2001), focusing on where the bottom may be, excess wafer capacity, and IC average selling prices (ASPs).