Issue

The remarkable growth of the semiconductor industry over the past half-century has depended on a constant stream of new, high-volume end-use products. As we emerge from a severe slump, the nature of the market is changing once again. Pieces are falling into place in new and sometimes surprising ways for a major revolution in end uses for electronic devices. While the PC remains a major market for chips, we are seeing a transition back to consumer electronics as a significant industry driver, as

In one of its broadest equipment development programs to date, and perhaps its largest with a Japanese company, International Sematech will work with Hitachi Ltd. on a 27-month effort to accelerate development of Hitachi`s 300mm etchers, CD-SEMs, wafer inspection, defect analysis, and waste abatement equipment. The program will also provide test material for 0.13?m and 0.10?m development at International Sematech member companies, and assistance for advanced tool development at other equipment c

Sematech may merge with Int`l arm. After more than a year of operating two separate Sematechs, one international and one for US members only, directors of the chip manufacturing consortiums are considering a merger plan that would create a single global organization. Such a merger would bring together 15 IC companies from the US, Europe, Taiwan, and South Korea with deep ties in precompetitive research projects, 300mm tool evaluation, and other areas of semiconductor manufacturing devel

For some time now, Taiwan`s semiconductor industry has been able to crow about having the design, wafer processing, assembly, test, and end-user sectors all in close proximity on its island.

Featuring nearly 2000 new products, this 1999-2000 Research Chemicals, Metals, and Materials Catalog covers a range of high-purity substances, including inorganics; pure metals; elements; alloys; precious metal compounds and catalysts; rare earths; and ceramics and composites. The catalog has been expanded to include product descriptions that contain more physical property data and application notes, as well as 1500 cross-references and thousands of chemical structures, and will be

Infineon Technologies Corp., San Jose, CA, formerly Siemens Microelectronics, has named Bharat Dave president and CEO. Dave was most recently COO of Siemens. Peter Bauer, former president/CEO of Siemens, is now a member of the managing board of Infineon Technologies AG, the parent company of Infineon Technologies Corp.

Unit processes now exist to plasma etch the main categories of possible interconnect low-k dielectrics. Integration challenges and trade-offs remain for all films, though all can be etched within a dual-damascene process flow. Controllability and cost of the integrated process will determine material choice, since unit processes are relatively similar.

In a relatively short period, 157nm lithography has gone from "not possible" to the forefront of optical lithography development efforts. While significant challenges remain, particularly for mask and pellicle technologies, recent but quiet development work on calcium fluoride, fluorine-laser sources, and alternative mask substrates has brought the industry back to a "can do" attitude.

Inkless assembly solves these problems because it uses electronic wafer maps instead of ink to classify good and bad die. In addition, inkless assembly enables software-driven material inventory tracking and gives process control engineers a usable form of history that can help them determine yield loss.

A standard for graphical user interfaces (GUIs) on all semiconductor manufacturing equipment is expected to be endorsed by Semi members in time for Semi West next month, followed by formal committee approval at the July show. This draft document 2873B has been over two years in the making, including changes from two balloting cycles, and culminates a 10-year effort driven by manufacturers, equipment suppliers, Sematech, J300, I300I, and others.

Buried layer substrates formed by high-energy implantation and rapid thermal annealing are an attractive alternative to epitaxial substrates where high performance is required at lower cost. The heavier p-type doping and close proximity to the active devices make buried implanted layers much more effective than epitaxial wafers in eliminating transient latch-up events. The unique defect control ability of buried layer substrates lowers diode leakage and improves gate oxide integrity relative to

Electron density, electron collision rate, bulk power, and peak voltage can be used to characterize plasmas used in semiconductor production, particularly in plasma etching. Practical implementation is via self-excited electron resonance spectroscopy, which has been used to measure the dependence of critical internal plasma parameters on variations of external parameters and changes in wafer structure. Work reported here has enabled the optimization of cleaning procedures and determination of

Thin-film metrology, crucial to semiconductor manufacturing, requires clear understanding of the definitions used within the context of individual applications. Together, precision, repeatability, and stability, when properly specified and evaluated, provide a fairly broad characterization of thin-film metrology tools. A metrology system may work well in production when meeting all the requirements for these parameters.

The ELAN 6100 DRC inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer incorporates Dynamic Reaction Cell Technology, which is designed to eliminate argon species interferences, and to make routine the detection of iron, calcium. potassium, and arsenic. It allows semiconductor manufacturers to detect abd measure these critical elements at the parts per trillion and quadrillion levels, a capacity historically degraded by interference from argon. Features of the tool include the GemClean HF-resistant cros