07/10/2002  July 10, 2002 - Seoul, Korea - Samsung Electronics Co. said it plans to invest an additional 160.8 billion won (US$137.8M) to upgrade two of its 13 existing semiconductor production lines at its Kiheung plant.

07/09/2002  July 9, 2002 - San Jose, CA - Electroglas Inc., a supplier of process management tools for the semiconductor industry, has unveiled DefectID, automatic defect classification software that helps improve manufacturing productivity and yields for wafer fabrication test, assembly, and packaging operations.

07/09/2002  Tokyo, Japan - Toshiba Corp. said it will invest five billion yen over the next two years to boost its semiconductor manufacturing capacity in China, in order to meet growing local demand. Toshiba also plans to take full control of a local joint venture.

07/01/2002  Last month I had the good fortune to have a lengthy chat with the leadership of the IEEE Components, Packaging and Manufacturing Technology (CPMT) Society during ECTC

07/01/2002  Adept Technology and DEK have announced a partnership to develop a fully automated wafer handling system for DEK's screen printer wafer bumping and ball placement system

06/26/2002  June 26, 2002 - Taipei, Taiwan - Major semiconductor companies and other high-tech firms at the two science-based industrial parks in Taiwan were not affected by the strong earthquake yesterday.

06/26/2002  Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have invented a wafer that can detect neutron radiation from concealed nuclear weapons. An inexpensive handheld device that incorporates the wafer could eventually be used in airports by law enforcement agencies or by weapons inspectors.

06/25/2002  June 25, 2002 - Singapore - Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing has named Chia Song Hwee president and CEO. He also joins the company's board of directors.

06/25/2002 

06/24/2002  Asia's big chipmakers have been embracing metrology systems as technology changes come on stream, devices grow in complexity, and time-to-market pressures escalate.

06/24/2002  June 24, 2002 - Milpitas, CA, and Cambridge, England - Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Singapore, and ARM, a provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC processor technology, said that Chartered has joined the ARM Foundry Program.

06/24/2002  Princeton's Nanostructures Laboratory is on a roll, with two significant small tech advances announced in one week.

06/20/2002  It is hard to imagine disruption of conventional wafer-to-tape mounting carriers used with wafer dicing in semiconductor assembly, but a newly patented wafer mounting technique (US patent 6,383,606, May 7, 2002) from Diamond Touch Technology Inc. (DTTI), Prescott Valley, AZ, brings a whole new set of capabilities and productivity to dicing and scribing.

06/20/2002  June 20, 2002 - San Diego, CA - JMAR Technologies Inc., a developer and provider of compact point-source, laser plasma lithography systems and sources, has received a contract for $5.3 million from the US Army Robert Morris Acquisition Center in Adelphi, MD, to finance the completion of the first of its integrated proprietary point-source laser plasma lithography systems.

06/19/2002  June 19, 2002 - Santa Clara, CA - Applied Materials Inc. has introduced its new 300mm single-wafer Oasis Clean system.

06/17/2002  While securing grants and providing contract services to industrial firms have been the mainstay of revenue for Integrated Sensing Systems Inc. (ISSYS), this small tech company is staking its future economic success on the medical industry.

06/12/2002  Hsinchu, Taiwan - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said it's mulling a district in Shanghai as one of the possible locations for its first wafer fab in China.

06/12/2002  June 12, 2002 - San Jose, CA - Samsung Semiconductor Inc. unveiled its first successful development of a next-generation wafer processing technology in which a hafnium dioxide-aluminum oxide laminate film is fabricated on the silicon wafer using Atomic Layer Deposition.

06/11/2002  June 6, 2002 - Munich, Germany - Scientists from Infineon Technologies have made an advance in the promising field of carbon nanotube (CNT) research. A tried-and-tested microelectronics process was modified so that CNTs could be grown at predefined locations on 6" wafers.

06/10/2002  June 10, 2002 - Villach, Austria - Wet wafer surface preparation supplier, the SEZ Group, has acquired US-based private company, L-Tech Corp., a manufacturer of drying equipment for batch wafer processing.