Issue

While the United States remains a world leader in many areas of technology, it is clear that over the past few decades the lead has been shrinking.

Semiconductor chip manufacturing technology in general, and MEMS manufacturing technology in particular, have applications in emerging life sciences fields.

A number of emerging trends could very well re-shape the MEMS industry as we know it over the next few years.

Metal fuses in redundancy circuitry can be laser repaired to enhance yield. However, shrinking IC design rules have necessitated fuse pitches smaller than the 2µm pitch lines that can be processed by traditional infrared lasers.

Immersion-based optical lithography techniques at 193nm have made great progress and are viewed by many as an option for the 45nm node.

Next-generation MOSFET devices require the introduction of metal gate (MG) electrodes for further performance increases.

Leakage control in hand-held and wireless devices is a challenge that increases with IC technology nodes.

Solid State Technology and sister magazine Advanced Packaging invited SEMICON West attendees to vote on the best products they saw at the July trade show in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

The urgent need to push storage densities and access speeds for memory is even more intense than that faced by semiconductor technologists who have miraculously followed Moore’s Law for nearly 50 years.

As the superparamagnetic limit continues to make scaling of conventional magnetic recording technology to higher densities and larger capacities more difficult, novel concepts such as patterned magnetic media are being considered as likely routes to terabit per square inch densities and beyond.

Both flash memories and miniature disk drives have begun to replace each other in a variety of applications, mostly in portable but also in some fixed devices.

As the hard-disk drive celebrates its 50th anniversary, the future for the industry has never been brighter.