Issue

Over the past 30 years, the solar industry has made a number of false starts, and the underlying photovoltaics (PV) technology has gained a reputation for being impractical without government subsidies.

Membership in the elite group of chipmakers spending at least $1 billion will expand to 16 companies this year, with memory firms particularly aggressive in their capacity investments, according to IC Insights Inc.

Layer-transfer technology is becoming more important as the demand for high-performance applications requiring enhanced semiconductor functions increases, and other applications such as MEMS and packaging continue to expand.

New models are needed to account for the process variations in nanometer-era silicon manufacturing, so that new chips can be designed with acceptable yield and performance without requiring costly re-spins.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, CMOS became increasingly standardized as dimensions shrunk from 1µm to 0.

Silicon oxynitride gate-stack dielectrics are reaching limits for use beyond 65nm technology.

For the past several years, the need for advanced gate-stack materials has been listed by Sematech as one of the top technical challenges faced by the semiconductor industry [1].

The lower resistivity of copper vs. aluminum facilitates denser and faster ULSI devices with on-chip copper interconnects.

This article describes an alternative dose-measurement method of analyzing ultra-low energy (ULE) ion implantation.

Three resist systems are commonly available for 193nm immersion lithography: resist with solvent-soluble topcoat, resist with an aqueous developer-soluble topcoat, and special 193i immersion resist needing no topcoat at all.

OPC models for leading-edge lithography must be calibrated with empirical data, and the measure of mismatch between design-intent and CD-SEM data is termed edge-placement error (EPE).

The ability to improve IC manufacturing costs has been one of the great success stories of the semiconductor industry.

The Cougar-SMT X-ray inspection system can image components in 2D and 3D for thorough inspection of applications requiring high magnifications, such as MEMS/MOEMS, semiconductor packages, and high-density interconnects.