12/14/2000  Sunnyvale, California--AMD and Alliance Semiconductor Corp. have settled the patent infringement lawsuit filed by AMD against Alliance in 1996, asserting that Alliance's Flash memory devices infringed two AMD Flash memory patents. The two companies now are discussing future joint projects.

12/14/2000  San Jose, California--Altera Corp. has agreed to sell its 23% equity ownership interest in WaferTech, a foundry in Camas, Washington, to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC) for US$350 million. TSMC has also signed agreements with ADI and ISSI to acquire their shares in the company. Altera expects to close the transaction by the end of the year, at which time TSMC will increase its holding in WaferTech from 66.89% to nearly 100%.

12/13/2000  Santa Clara, California--Intel Corp. announced today that its new wafer fab, currently under construction in Leixlip, Ireland, will begin production in 2002 using state-of-the-art 300mm technology. The project, first announced in June of this year, originally was planned as a 200mm fab.

12/13/2000  South Portland, Maine--Fairchild Semiconductor International's Interface and Logic Group has announced the addition of four new CMOS 3-STATE dual buffers in the US8 package, which the company claims have particular value in portable battery powered devices such as cell phones and mobile computers.

12/13/2000  Willow Grove, Pennsylvania--Kulicke & Soffa (K&S) Industries Inc., a supplier of semiconductor assembly equipment and materials, has completed its acquisition of Santa Clara, California-based Probe Technology Corp. The acquisition, combined with the recently completed tender offer for Cerprobe Corp., may make K&S the world's leading supplier of probe cards and sockets used for testing semiconductor wafers and integrated circuits.

12/12/2000  Newbury Park, California--Semtech Corp., a supplier of mixed-signal semiconductors for communications, computers, and industrial equipment, today announced a new device that simplifies and lowers the cost of designing highly efficient core power supplies and voltage regulator modules (VRMs) for advanced microprocessors (in single and multiprocessor configurations), digital signal processors (DSPs), and memory subsystems.

12/12/2000  Sunnyvale, California--AMD has announced that it expects to report fourth quarter (4Q) sales flat to nominally higher than for the immediate-prior quarter, ended October 1, 2000, when it reported record sales of $1,206,549,000. The company now expects that 4Q net income will be in the range of $0.50 to $0.60 per share, depending on the relative strength of PC processor sales in the closing weeks of the quarter.

12/12/2000  Midgal Haemek, Israel--Tower Semiconductor has announced agreements with Macronix, Israel Corp., and QuickLogic to complete the $300 million equity funding it lacked to begin the construction of its new 200mm fab.

12/12/2000  Hsinchu, Taiwan--Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) announced yesterday the delivery of 0.13-micron functioning wafers to VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading fabless semiconductor design house. The 0.13-micron functioning wafers are a foundry industry first, TSMC believes.

12/11/2000  East Fishkill, New York--Using advanced chipmaking technology, IBM Corp. has begun producing powerful new microchips for servers, communications gear, and pervasive computing products.

12/11/2000  Sweden--Micronic Laser Systems AB, a developer of semiconductor and display laser pattern generators for the production of photomasks to worldwide electronic industries, today announced that it has extended its partnership with Fraunhofer Institute for Microelectronic Circuits and Systems (IMS) to include all semiconductor direct write applications based on Micronic's use of the spatial light modulator (SLM) technology.

12/11/2000  Danbury, Connecticut--Praxair China has signed a 15-year contract to supply Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) with industrial gases.

12/11/2000  With the first production 300mm fabs scheduled for ramp up next year, chipmakers want tools to arrive at the fab site automation-friendly, though full supplier compliance to new 300mm software standards is unclear, say participants of a recent workshop on 300mm software requirements for automated manufacturing in Austin, TX.

12/07/2000  East Fishkill, New York, and Munich, Germany--IBM and Infineon Technologies plan to jointly develop a memory technology that may significantly increase battery life of portable computing devices and lead to 'instant-on' computers.

12/07/2000  Hsinch, Taiwan--Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) today announced that its net sales for November 2000 reached a new high of $18,173 million, representing an increase of 131.2% over November 1999 sales and approximately 4.1% over October 2000 sales.

12/07/2000  Chiba, Japan--Rodel, Inc. recently introduced the SPM3100 polishing pad, the newest product in its line of silicon and substrates polishing solutions. The SPM3100 pad was developed for use in the final polish step of silicon wafers and alternative substrates, such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP).

12/06/2000  Villach, Austria--The SEZ Group announced today that it has produced 300mm wafers as thin as 80 microns, which the company reports have excellent uniformity and are four times stronger than those that have only undergone a grinding process to achieve that thickness.

12/06/2000  Sunnyvale, California--Thomas West Inc., a provider of chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) materials, has developed The Right Pad 813, a highly porous, soft pad for tungsten CMP processes. The company reports that the pad's structure will enable industry to reduce costs while solving CMP performance problems such as erosion, planarization, and uniformity, in addition to achieving high removal rates combined with low slurry consumption.

12/06/2000  Tokyo, Japan--ASML today introduced dual wafer stage technology for new i-line and deep ultraviolet (UV) imaging systems, extending the product offerings of its TWINSCAN 300mm technology platform. This dual wafer stage system optimizes the lithographic processing of 300mm wafers by parallel operation of two independent wafer stages, according to ASML.

12/06/2000  Tokyo, Japan--Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International's (SEMI) 'Consensus Forecast,' which includes input from 72 of the trade association's member companies in the U.S., Europe, and Japan, projects that the semiconductor manufacturing equipment market will grow 22% in 2001 to US$57.2 billion.