05/11/2000  WILTON, CONN--May 11, 2000--Semiconductor manufacturers can now use one platform as they convert to 300 mm with a product designed to evolve lithography from 248 nm to 193 nm to 157 nm. Silicon Valley Group's Micrascan supports a variety of optical trains accommodating the adjustment in technology without requiring changes in tools or in the fab itself, says a company official.

05/09/2000  Geneva--May 9, 2000--STMicroelectronics today announced the next generation of its MOSFET devices that tackle the limits of cell layout with its strip-width based single-featured size process.

05/08/2000  GRESHAM, Ore.--May 8, 2000--Fujitsu Microeletronics' flash memory product roadmap for this year now includes a $550 million expansion of its Oregon facility.

05/01/2000  Digital wireless content is everywhere. Cellular phones, internet applications, pagers and other personal communications devices are capable of receiving and storing a wide variety of message types, including e-mail, voice, fax and executable code.

05/01/2000  DRESDEN, GERMANY-Just two years after setting up the Semiconductor 300 pilot line under a joint venture with Motorola, Infineon Technologies says it's ready to invest roughly $1 billion to launch a new 300mm production DRAM fab in Dresden, Germany

05/01/2000  Capitalizing on advanced intellectual property (IP) delivery and rapid silicon prototyping tools (two of the major dividends that resulted from its recent acquisition of VLSI Technology), Philips Semiconductors has launched a design methodology that will allow the vast pool of IP to be used quickly and effectively.

05/01/2000  As the use of unpackaged semiconductor devices becomes more widespread, the need for the reliable availability of KGD becomes increasingly important.

04/26/2000  Intel has announced a Fall volume production of its Advanced+ Boot Block flash chip, the company's first flash memory product on 0.18-?m lithography.

04/26/2000  NEC will spend $2.9 billion to build two 300-mm, 12-inch wafer fabs. The construction will occur simultaneously and will double the company's semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

04/24/2000  Ultratech Stepper has closed its UltraBeam Lithography business.

04/19/2000  Texas Instruments reaped the rewards of the Internet-backed bandwidth push last quarter with revenues of $2.653 billion. The technology giant cited digital signal processor (DSP) deals with Cisco and Sony that pushed revenues up 27 percent from 1999's first quarter and up 4 percent sequentially.

04/11/2000  IBM announced it will use Dow Chemical's SiLK dielectric resin to integrate copper metal in the company's next line of CMOS 9S process technology. Using spin-on equipment, the company says the low-k resin will become part of its recipe for next-generation products.

04/03/2000  Bolstered by the rising demand in DRAM chips, worldwide semiconductor revenues reached a record level of $168.6 billion in 1999, a 22 percent increase from 1998's total of $138.7 billion.

04/01/2000  IBM Research has announced breakthrough results in developing a family of experimental high-speed computer circuits that run at test speeds up to five times faster than today`s top chips. The new circuits employ an innovative design called Interlocked Pipelined CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) to reach speeds of 3.3 to 4.5 billion cycles per second (3.3 to 4.5 GHz) using conventional silicon transistors, while dramatically reducing power consumption. IBM researchers estimate that c

04/01/2000  The NanoMapper metrology tool provides whole wafer topology data for 200-mm and 300-mm wafer sizes using non-contact optical measurement to quantify nanometer scale surface height variations. It responds to process development needs for leading-edge semiconductor devices down to 0.1 micron. Tracking the phase of the optical signal using proprietary interferometric technology results in the sub-nanometer resolution of the measurement.

04/01/2000  WOBURN, MA— ONE DOWN, 10 TO go.
That's one way to sum up the draft process for new cleanroom standards that are being hammered out by Technical Committee 209 of the International Organization for Standardization's (ISO; Geneva).

04/01/2000  Mount Prospect, IL—Extensive field testing by industry has led the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology's Working Group on cleanroom housekeeping, operating and monitoring procedures to add two alternate methods of mopping walls and floors to its recommended practice (RP) 18.2.

03/23/2000  SiGen will team with Akrion to qualify production-worthy wet cleaning recipes for its NanoCleave silicon-on-insulator wafer fabrication process.

03/23/2000  For $450 million, Intel's purchase of Basis Communications garners the company chips and other products for moving data across the Internet and corporate networks. The acquisition is part of Intel's effort to redefine itself as a networking and communications company.

03/21/2000  Berkeley Process Control OEMs are now marketing a wafer management system for 300-mm fabs.