Issue

There is growing urgency worldwide to refocus energy policies. The thirst for fossil fuels is escalating in fast-developing nations, bringing supply and demand into a delicate balance, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to increase supply.

Total worldwide foundry sales rose 16.7% in 2006 to $21.5 billion, shrugging off a slowdown in business and an industrywide inventory buildup to represent nearly 24% of total semiconductor sales, according to data from Gartner Dataquest.

Many presentations at this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium showed the 45nm node in production as scheduled, using 193nm immersion lithography, while others looked ahead to future nodes achieved on the two-year ITRS schedule (32nm in 2009, 22nm in 2011, etc.).

In semiconductor manufacturing, damage and yield losses attributed to the effects of static charges are well documented, as are the specific causes of static charge generation.

As the semiconductor industry enters its fifth decade, one of its greatest advantages over other technology-driven fields is infrastructure.

Leading-edge fabs produce thousands of part numbers with new kinds of problems related to shrinking geometries, such as random defects from particulates and systematic fails caused by process alignment errors.

To achieve uniform copper plating on the surface of a wafer consistently in a production lot, a particle-free plating chemical solution must be presented to the wafer under uniform pressure, uniform flow, and in the proper chemical formulation.

Wafer cleaning is becoming an increasingly critical process module in the semiconductor manufacturing flow.

Making reliable systems through direct interconnection between dice requires proper integration of via-processing technology as well as thinning and stacking technologies.

Tritone reticle designs present many challenges for both photomask manufacturers and defect inspection equipment suppliers.