Issue

This month, a group of individuals will receive some well deserved recognition for their work in developing technical solutions that benefit humanity and address the most critical issues facing our planet and its people.

Gartner now expects capex to slide even further this year (-25% to $47.1B) and will drop another 13% in 2009 to $41.1B, thanks to a full-on collapse in memory investments and economic pressures on consumer spending habits. Look for a pickup in 2010 (16.7% to $47.9B) and a bigger surge in 2011 (23.1% to $59.0B), and then another downturn in 2012 (-10.5% to $52.8B).

A full-day symposium at this year’s Diskcon USA (Sept. 14-18) explored the lithography implications of sub-ITRS roadmap feature sizes on disk drives, with the challenge that HDD lithography must cost 10?? less than NAND flash lithography, the lowest-cost semiconductor process.

Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials recently announced CMP pad groove designs that enable defect and slurry reduction.

At the 32nm node, technology enablers such as double-patterning, strain enhancement, advanced OPC, etc., require design for manufacturing (DFM) to support a design through manufacturing (D2M) methodology that is correct-by-construction.

A variety of plasma techniques have been introduced to manage the unique dielectric and conductor etch challenges encountered at the wafer’s edge, as well as address bevel-clean challenges that impact yield.

The most significant issue in LED MOCVD growth today is precise control of the wafer temperature throughout the whole growth process.

A chemical vapor deposition (CVD) polymer technology has been developed to use low cost monomers and provide highly crystalline and thermally stable polymer films for the sub-65μm ICs and OLED display applications.