Issue

Not too long ago, most semiconductor fabricating plants made a family of standard chips or discretes.

Worldwide Highlights; USA; Japan; Asia Pacific; and Europe

Lithography's nemesis exposed; Practical in situ FTIR for CVD yields revised TEOS-O3 model; Powerful simulation yields perovskite transistors; Low noise microchannels developed; Sub-0.1-µm filtration for 248nm resists; and Tech Briefs

Cleanroom material brochure; CD-ROM metals and materials catalog; Online vacuum components catalog; and Vacuum e-business site

SEM with 3-D imaging; Coat/develop cluster system; Surface topography measurement; Spray etch processor; and more.

European boom led by telecom, automotive, smart cards; 1000+ exhibitors expected at Europa; Smart card market zooms

After maintaining relative stability in the face of the 1996-1998 IC industry downturn, the European market grew to $28.2 billion in 1999, a 10% increase over 1998's $25.5 billion in revenue.

Working down from anticipated device trends over the next five years to deposition and etch process needs, we can derive a comprehensive list of specification advances needed for mass flow control and other gas components.

Developing 157nm lithography capability in time for production requires the solution to several daunting materials challenges.

The integration of system functions and even entire systems onto a single chip is now feasible.

Dielectric erosion is an existing issue for copper damascene chemical mechanical planarization even when hard dielectric materials such as dense SiO₂ are used.

Using the organic semiconductor pentacene as the active material, we have fabricated high-performance organic thin-film transistors and the fastest ICs using organic transistors reported to date.

European research into the limits of CMOS technology, which comes from the demand for low voltage, low power and high performance, stems from strong cooperation between device and materials efforts.

Energy-filtering transmission electron microscopy is becoming an important nanoanalysis technique in materials science. Its main advantage comes from the two-dimensional chemical information or "elemental maps" at nanometer resolution extracted quickly from large sample areas.