Issue

With large sectors of manufacturing, including chipmaking, moving from the US and Europe to Asia, what impact is this having on national economies?

Demand for new semiconductor manufacturing equipment surged in December, during what was the final fiscal month for most North American companies, according to the latest data from SEMI.

Claiming “a significant breakthrough in transistor technology,” Intel Corp. says it has advanced its 45nm process technology from a SRAM test chip unveiled in Jan. 2006 into working 45nm micrprocessors, chips that incorporate a hafnium-based high-k dielectric material and a new combination of metals for the transistor gate electrode.

Any chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) process can be conceptually separated into chemical and mechanical components.

For years, semiconductor manufacturers depended on a happy coincidence: smaller transistors are less expensive to manufacture and also deliver better performance.

In today’s advanced integrated circuits (ICs), critical manufacturing challenges such as hot spots are becoming routine phenomena.

Made manifest by any trip to an electronics store, LCDs are now everywhere in applications from cell phones to televisions.

Freescale was recently honored with a product award for its magnetoresistive random access memory (MRAM) product, the Freescale MR2A16ATS35C 4-Mbit MRAM.

Today, the cost of developing and maintaining software is rising faster than other costs associated with semiconductor equipment design, largely due to an increased emphasis on automation and process control.

Feature sizes of state-of-the-art production semiconductor devices are now in the 65nm regime, and this has produced a corresponding reduction in the size of “killer” defects that destroy device functionality and critically degrade process yield.

The growing complexity of the stack capacitor process module is driving new electron-beam inspection applications in advanced DRAM manufacturing fabs.

Two chamber cleaning gases, CF4 and C2F6, dominated the cleaning gas market for old-generation CVD tools.

Market projections by industry analysts indicate that China is on a steady growth path, reinforcing its stake as a viable, competitive player in the global IC manufacturing arena.

As in many industries, the growth lifecycle of the semiconductor industry can be described by the three phases of a classic S-curve.