Issue

When former US Vice President Al Gore testified on climate change before US House and Senate committees this spring, he called on the US to take the lead in reducing the greenhouse gases responsible for global warming.

Semiconductor industry observers who think the drive for lower manufacturing costs and cycle time is a recent phenomenon would do well to acquaint themselves with the history of the data handoff between design and manufacturing.

IC manufacturing is performed with hundreds of sequential steps, each of which could experience problems leading to yield loss.

Although backside defects have historically received much less attention than frontside defects, semiconductor manufacturers now realize that backside defectivity can contribute significantly to yield loss.

Since the fall of 2003 when immersion lithography produced its first images and began appearing on roadmaps, the technology has made rapid progress towards maturity.

Conventional CMOS logic device scaling beyond the 90nm node requires local strain engineering to increase electron and hole mobilities and enhance transistor performance [1-4].

In today’s consumer electronics world, where integrated circuits provide the majority of system functionality, vibrating mechanical devices in the form of quartz crystals are still used as clock sources in most applications.