10/12/2001 
As high-tech products grow smaller, engineers require smaller instruments to work on them. At the heart of some of those instruments might be cone-shaped carbide crystalline tips – 10 nanometers at the top and 0.5 micron at the base. Electrons stream off of these tips to do their jobs, which include manufacture of integrated circuits and, someday, helping to propel spacecraft.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Bilthoven, Netherlands - ASM International N.V. announced that its subsidiary, ASM Europe B.V., has developed a low-cost low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) process for poly-crystalline silicon germanium (SiGe) films on 300mm wafers.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Chelmsford, MA - Brooks Automation Inc., supplier of tool and factory hardware and software automation solutions for the semiconductor industry, completed the acquisition of Tec-Sem AG (Tec-Sem), a manufacturer of bare reticle stockers, tool buffers and batch transfer systems for the semiconductor industry.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc., a semiconductor packaging and testing company, will launch volume production of wafer-level chip scale packages (CSP) this quarter, ramping up to 2.4 million chips/month.

10/10/2001  Shin-Etsu Chemical, parent of wafer maker SEH, expects profits to increase 9% for the six months through September, compared the same period last year.

10/10/2001  October 10, 2001 - Seoul, Korea - At the FSA Suppliers Expo, Dongbu Electronics launched an incentive program for qualified companies to use its regularly scheduled 0.18- and 0.25-micron ShuttleChip prototyping service.

10/09/2001  October 9, 2001 -- MENLO PARK, CA -- FabTime Inc. recently announced that it had completed the installation of its FabTime cycle time management system at AMD's Fab 25 in Austin, TX. Fab 25 has more than 100,000 square feet of cleanroom space, and was designed to support several generations of process technology. AMD selected FabTime's software to aid in cycle time improvement efforts at Fab 25.

10/08/2001  Oct. 8, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Intel Corp. researchers say they have developed a new packaging technology that they assert will help the company build processors with more than 1 billion transistors that will be 10 times faster than the fastest processors today.

10/08/2001  October 8, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) has revised its annual financial forecast for 2001.

10/05/2001  October 5, 2001 - Washington, DC - Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) called on Congress to support accelerated depreciation for high-tech manufacturing equipment as part of the economic stimulus package announced by President Bush this week.

10/03/2001  October 3, 2001 - Tokyo, Japan - Fujitsu and NEC, two of Japan's five chipmaking companies said they are temporarily idling a number of semiconductor plants in Japan as they confront a record chip market downturn.

10/03/2001  October 3, 2001 - Wilmington, DE & Kawasaki, Japan - DuPont Electronics Technologies and Tokyo Ohka Kogya Co. Ltd. (TOK) have signed a license and development agreement to enable production of photoresists for use in making future generations of semiconductors chips.

10/02/2001  Does CMP stand for Can't Make it Polish? Is ASP a venomous snake? When is a semiconductor not an IC? With all the gobbledygook in the semiconductor industry, it's easy to see why even people who've been in the business since Moses was a process engineer can be easily confused.

10/02/2001  October 2, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Applied Materials Inc. is signing a multi-year collaboration and licensing agreement for its FAB300 MES (manufacturing execution system) software with Intel.

10/02/2001  October 2, 2001 - Wilsonville, OR - Mentor Graphics Corp. announced new patent pending Design-for-Test technology called Embedded Deterministic Test (EDT) that extends the capacity of automatic test equipment for a reduction in the cost of semiconductor testing, which can represent as much as 50% of manufacturing costs.

10/02/2001  October 2, 2001 - Peabody, MA - SOITEC, a manufacturer of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafers for use in semiconductor manufacturing, today announced the appointment of 25-year industry veteran George Celler to the newly created position of chief scientist.

10/01/2001  October 1, 2001 - Sunnyvale, CA - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD) will close two older factories in southeast Austin and cut 1,000 jobs during the next nine months.

10/01/2001  QUINCY, MA—The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) committee 318 recently adopted two protocols for testing non-fire propagating materials used to manufacture cleanroom tools and equipment—Factory Mutual Research 4910 Protocol and Undewriter's Laboratories (UL) 2360.

10/01/2001  In semiconductor manufacturing, the high value of semiconductor wafers has traditionally placed a heightened emphasis on wafer traceability - the ability to automatically track a wafer through the fabrication process

09/28/2001  September 28, 2001 - Flanders, NJ - Rudolph Technologies and Therma-Wave, Inc., today announced that they have reached a settlement in their Patent Interference proceeding.