Issue

These are difficult times for the semiconductor industry. Many would say the most difficult ever. Hopefully, we are nearing the end of the recession and prosperity will quickly return.

Data requirements for semiconductor manufacturing equipment have increased dramatically over the past decade. So much, in fact, that tool-control software purchased or built more than five years ago is probably already outdated.

Signs that the DRAM market hit a bottom in 1Q and is poised to rebound don’t quite paint the whole picture, which from a broader perspective still shows things plodding along, far from a meaningful recovery.

In its first foray outside of the US, IITC 2009 (June 1-3) took place in Sapporo, Japan, attended by some 600 scientists, engineers, exhibitors, and other interconnect professionals.

Toppan Printing Co. Ltd. has established a new photomask manufacturing process at its photomask facility in Asaka, Japan, to support 32nm and 28nm semiconductor device production, through an ongoing joint development project with IBM.

A team of researchers at MIT have produced 36nm-wide lines using interference patterns and a photochromic material, and say the technique could be extended down to patterns on the scale of individual molecules.

Novellus says its new CoolFill tungsten CVD process offers a larger process window to achieve void-free fill that meets the ITRS’ electrical property requirements for 32nm DRAM and logic devices.

Extreme and non-planar substrate topographies that provide challenges for conventional thin film deposition techniques are abundant.

Graphene, the single layer of graphite, has been the focus of many researchers internationally because of its unique electronic properties.

One of the major contributions to the optical critical dimensions metrology uncertainty is the variations in optical properties (n&k’s) of film stack materials.

At face value, the camera inside a cell phone is no different from that found in many other digital imaging applications.