10/26/2001  October 26, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - Chipmakers including Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) plan to retool portions of their 200mm wafer fabs into 300mm wafer facilities to sharpen their competitive edge, according to Financial Times.

10/26/2001  Sterling Semiconductor Inc., a subsidiary of Uniroyal Technology Corp., will begin customer sampling of its new 3-inch diameter silicon carbide (SiC) substrate.

10/25/2001  October 25, 2001 - Hsinchu, Taiwan - Republic of China President Chen Shui-bian visited the newest manufacturing operations of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. in the southern city of Tainan.

10/24/2001  October 24, 2001 - Chelmsford and Billerica, MA - Brooks Automation and PRI Automation have announced a definitive agreement under which Brooks will acquire PRI Automation, creating the leading supplier of semiconductor automation systems, software and services, with pro forma annual sales for fiscal year 2001 (ended September 30, 2001) of approximately $700 million.

10/22/2001  October 22, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Altis Semiconductor, the joint venture of IBM and Infineon located in Corbeil-Essonnes, France, has selected Applied Materials' single-wafer SiNgen LPCVD (low pressure chemical vapor deposition) system to deposit critical silicon nitride films in the transistor region of its most advanced logic chips.

10/22/2001 

After billions of dollars in investments -- followed by an economy heading for recession -- MEMS optical switch startups are about to be tested by the market.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Geneva, Switzerland - STMicroelectronics plans to close its Rancho Bernardo 6-inch front-end wafer fabrication production and transfer the fab's products, processes and equipment to ST's manufacturing facilities in Carrollton, TX, and Singapore. Three hundred and thirty employees will be affected.

10/19/2001  October 19, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - At last month's Intel RosettaNet Interoperability Fest (IOF), 26 supply chain trading partners and 13 e-business solution providers exchanged Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents using RosettaNet e-business standards.

10/18/2001  October 18, 2001 - Shanghai, China - Applied Materials Inc. marked the opening of the company's major new facility and technical training center in the Pudong Zhangjiang High-Tech Park, Shanghai.

10/17/2001  It's just possible that things may be getting so bad that the industry may be forced into rethinking long-standing practices and come up with some better ways of doing business.

10/15/2001  October 15, 2001 - Paris, France - Motorola and CEA-Leti, a department of CEA (Atomic Energy Commission of France), an R&D laboratory for MEMS products and technologies, have entered into an agreement to jointly develop and industrialize the next generation of surface micro-machined linear inertial sensors.

10/15/2001  October 15, 2001 - Villach, Austria - SEZ Group has broken ground on the expansion of its wet bench facility in Donaueschingen, Germany. The expansion is a key part of the company's worldwide wet bench strategy, as SEZ said the new facility will enable it to produce 300mm wet bench equipment and extend the company's sales capabilities outside of Europe.

10/12/2001  October 12, 2001 - Tokyo, Japan - Canon Inc. and Toshiba Corp. will form a technical alliance to develop next-generation silicon wafers expected to improve the processing speed and energy efficiency of semiconductors, sources at the companies said.

10/12/2001  Important lessons can be learned about the current and future state of the semiconductor industry by looking at historical cycles, according to IC Insights, Scottsdale, AZ. The research firm compared Cycle 3 (1983 - 1984) to the current Cycle 6 (1999 - 2001), focusing on where the bottom may be, excess wafer capacity, and IC average selling prices (ASPs).

10/12/2001  October 12, 2001 - Taipei, Taiwan - Winbond Electronics Corp. is postponing its plan to build a 300mm silicon wafer fab, according to The Financial Times. The company insists that it will not cancel the plan, but will concentrate on developing good products with existing facilities.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Bilthoven, Netherlands - ASM International N.V. announced that its subsidiary, ASM Europe B.V., has developed a low-cost low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) process for poly-crystalline silicon germanium (SiGe) films on 300mm wafers.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Chelmsford, MA - Brooks Automation Inc., supplier of tool and factory hardware and software automation solutions for the semiconductor industry, completed the acquisition of Tec-Sem AG (Tec-Sem), a manufacturer of bare reticle stockers, tool buffers and batch transfer systems for the semiconductor industry.

10/11/2001  October 11, 2001 - Santa Clara, CA - Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc., a semiconductor packaging and testing company, will launch volume production of wafer-level chip scale packages (CSP) this quarter, ramping up to 2.4 million chips/month.

10/10/2001  Shin-Etsu Chemical, parent of wafer maker SEH, expects profits to increase 9% for the six months through September, compared the same period last year.

10/09/2001  October 9, 2001 -- MENLO PARK, CA -- FabTime Inc. recently announced that it had completed the installation of its FabTime cycle time management system at AMD's Fab 25 in Austin, TX. Fab 25 has more than 100,000 square feet of cleanroom space, and was designed to support several generations of process technology. AMD selected FabTime's software to aid in cycle time improvement efforts at Fab 25.