Issue

Japan was the first Asian country to challenge the US in advanced chipmaking. Subsequently, other countries around the Pacific Rim were able to follow the Japanese model to become leading chipmakers themselves - first South Korea and then Taiwan.

The practice of stacking packaged DRAMs to achieve higher-density memories has been around for decades.

Increasing speed and functionality in ICs place severe demands on current interconnects in terms of speed (bandwidth), power, and density.

The 35th annual Semicon West conference and exhibition is back in one location this year - San Francisco - due to the expanded size of the Moscone Convention Center.

Solid State Technology asked industry experts to discuss how semiconductor companies can use what they already know to commercialize nanotechnology.

Relatively low-temperature rapid thermal processing offers some new alternatives for addressing the critical question of how to reduce source-drain parasitic resistance through ultralow thermal budget approaches.

The adoption of copper and low-k dielectrics has enabled the industry to overcome inherent limitations in aluminum and silicon dioxide materials used in IC interconnects as feature sizes and pitch spacing scale down.

Shrinking dimensions leave less volume for copper in interconnect structures, thereby increasing via and line resistances.

As transistors scale down in size, implant processes must accommodate requirements for lower energies and higher doses to improve advanced transistor performance.

The challenges associated with modern wafer processing in semiconductor manufacturing are being driven by an increase in the number of processing steps, increasing complexity of device technologies, process integration flows, and new materials incorporation.

Bottom antireflective coatings (BARC) enable semiconductor manufacturers to control substrate reflectivity, improve critical dimension (CD) patterning, and increase depth of focus in high-resolution photolithography.

While the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has critical dimension calibration standards for photomasks, the US agency has not yet developed a standard for phase measurements.