Issue

As semiconductor processing nears physical limits, manipulating technology to push ever further gets steadily more challenging.

Chinese semiconductor fab capital expenditures have whipsawed over the past three years, but next year Chinese fab capex is expected to be flat, and will extend to a relatively moderate 24.

Hot-spots resulting from nonuniform power dissipation over a chip are the bane of manufacturers of high-performance ICs such as CPUs, graphics chips, and DSPs—and as CMOS devices continue to scale and total power dissipation increases, these hot-spots will only become more pronounced.

The long-suffering mask making industry is presently in fine shape, according to experts at the 26th Annual BACUS Symposium on Photomask Technology in Monterey, CA, Sept.

Chip-on-board (COB) is the most dominant assembly process used to build over a million camera modules each day of the year.

The Candela Optical Surface Analyzer 6300 series provides full surface disk topography metrology in both radial and circumferential directions for data storage substrates and finished media.

Optical film measurement has evolved from manual offline analytical lab instruments to fully automated inline tools loaded with a wide array of measurement capabilities through adding and merging more optics and algorithms while retaining predecessors.

Low-k dielectric materials permit faster IC operation and improve electrical performance, but these materials are generally weaker and prone to mechanical failure.

The quest to satisfy the low-power and low-leakage requirements of portable/mobile consumer electronics is driving efforts to improve transistor performance.

Materials loss per cleaning cycle must be limited in advanced semiconductor process flows.

A new angle control technology has been developed to automatically measure beam angles before implant in both the horizontal and vertical planes and to correct for any deviation from the desired implant angle.

As an early pioneer in the worldwide semiconductor market, Japan holds a place of strategic importance for any company that supplies materials, components, and equipment to Asian semiconductor and related markets.