Issue

We've all seen the commercial with the greasy mechanic warning: "You can pay me now, or you can pay me laterU."

I enjoyed your November editorial "What will get the monkey off our back?"

Chip sales were up month-to-month and year-to-year in October, sign of a healthy industry recovery, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), San Jose, CA.

Engineers at Kopin Corp. (Taunton, MA) are using nanotechnology (patent pending as NanoPockets) to produce "CyberLites" — blue light-emitting diodes (LEDs) smaller than a grain of sand (Fig. 1).

Engineers from LSI Logic, Gresham, OR, and Ulvac Technologies, Methuen, MA, have developed a production process eliminating sulfuric-acid hydrogen-peroxide wet cleans for post high-dose ion implantation.

With the introduction of copper and low-k dielectric interconnects for advanced ICs, the semiconductor industry faces tremendous new challenges because reliability performance and failure mechanisms are not well understood (see figure).

SST editors ask ITRS authors about tough roadmap problems

ALD promises an exceptionally clean process technology at low temperature that could provide conformal and uniform coatings with extendibility to several nodes — for at least 10 years or more according to some (see table on p. 36 and "The market outlook" on p. 38).

The major issue and fundamental limitation for further scaling of the gate dielectric is the tunneling current's exponential increase due to the reduction in thickness.

The chemically amplified resists employed at the 130–70nm technology nodes require post-exposure bake (PEB) steps where the photo-acid catalyst generated by the exposure renders the resist soluble in a developer solution.

Plasma characteristics of a slot plane antenna plasma reactor were investigated — especially the ability of its low electron temperature and high plasma density to achieve damage-free processes.

Single-wafer tracking in combination with randomizing, which is essential for yield analysis, requires a wafer-ID read at many different process steps.