Solid State Technology articles from April 2007

Solid State Technology archives from April 2007

Contact hole lithography for 65nm logic.(LITHOGRAPHY)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Arrays of 100nm contact holes can be printed with adequate depth of focus (DOF) through pitch using dry 193nm wavelength exposure and a special illuminator design. Contact holes are among the most difficult IC structures to pattern. The design...

50th anniversary Web site.
April 1, 2007... Solid State Technology is celebrating its 50th anniversary with features throughout the year about the past, present, and future of semiconductor manufacturing technology. We invite our readers to submit remembrances, stories, and commentaries...

More P's please for DFM: predictable layouts, predictable designs, and predictive modeling.(DFM)(design for manufacturing)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Yield limiters associated with systematic manufacturing variations are only increasing as the industry moves from 65nm to 45nm and beyond. Additionally, with double patterning 193nm lithography gaining traction as the bridge between current...

EUV lithography: hedging bets, but seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.(LITHOGRAPHY)(extreme ultraviolet lithography )(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... The industry is finding ways to extend 193nm immersion such that many anticipate its use in volume manufacturing below 65nm half-pitch. But going beyond 45nm to 32nm half-pitch will require something new: either high-index lens and fluid...

Sustaining the innovation agenda.(EDITORIAL)(Editorial)
April 1, 2007... Despite the compelling agendas put forth in the current adminsitration's American Competitiveness Initiative, as well as in the National Academies' Rising Above the Gathering Storm report and the Council on Competitiveness's Innovate America...

Spansion tops Intel in tough NOR flash market.(BUSINESS TRENDS)
April 1, 2007... Market conditions for NOR flash memory weren't as harsh in 2006 as they were in 2005, but it was still no picnic with ASP getting pummeled, especially in the mobile phone sector, according to data from iSuppli Corp. Worldwide NOR flash...

Global sales of semiconductors rose 8.9% to a record $247.7 billion in 2006.(WORLDWIDE HIGHLIGHTS)(Financial report)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Global sales of semiconductors rose 8.9% to a record $247.7 billion in 2006, driven mainly by a host of consumer-oriented end products including cell phones and HDTV sets, according to final tallies by the Semiconductor Industry Association...

North American suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment enjoyed a double-digit boost in demand for their tools to kickstart 2007.(WORLDWIDE HIGHLIGHTS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... North American suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment enjoyed a double-digit boost in demand for their tools to kickstart 2007, and sales picked up as well, mainly due to capacity investments from memory firms, according to the...

Wafer demand surged in 2006 after moderate single-digit growth in 2005.(WORLDWIDE HIGHLIGHTS)(Financial report)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Wafer demand surged in 2006 after moderate single-digit growth in 2005, with both revenues and shipments up >20% due in large part to memory investments and growing adoption of 300mm processing, according to new data from SEMI. Silicon wafer...

Applied Materials Inc.(USA)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Applied Materials Inc. says it will cease development of beamline implant products, close its Applied Implant Technologies group in Horsham, UK, and phase support including new and refurbished tools into its global services arm. About 270...

Intel Corp.(USA)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Intel Corp. has tipped a "research chip" programmable processor with a single 80-core chip that achieves "teraflops performance" (trillions of calculations/sec), and consumes just 62W of power, less than that of some of today's single-core...

Honeywell Electronic Materials.(USA)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Honeywell Electronic Materials, Tempe, AZ, says it will invest >$1 million to expand its advanced packaging materials R&D center in Spokane, WA, by year's end, adding ~85 new pieces of equipment for more work on thermal interface materials, and...

In a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Renesas Technology Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. say they have developed a technique that achieves stable operation with 45nm bulk CMOS.(ASIAFOCUS)
April 1, 2007... In a paper at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Renesas Technology Corp. and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. say they have developed a technique that achieves stable operation with 45nm bulk CMOS, instead of...

NXP Semiconductors (nee Philips Semiconductors) and Taiwan's Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE) have agreed to form a joint venture in China.(ASIAFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... NXP Semiconductors (nee Philips Semiconductors) and Taiwan's Advanced Semiconductor Engineering Inc. (ASE) have agreed to form a joint venture in China to offer semiconductor testing and packaging for domestic and international markets across a...

STMicroelectronics.(ASIAFOCUS)(BITS Pilani)(IIT Delhi)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... STMicroelectronics has expanded its partnership with India's BITS Pilani and IIT Delhi to combine its capabilities with the two institutes' research capabilities, to proliferate VLSI design and embedded systems knowledge.

Sony Corp.(ASIAFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Sony Corp. plans to slash its chip spending in the next few years, and may look to outsource production of the next version of chips used in its PlayStation 3 gaming console, in a move to improve profitability. Sony, which already makes...

Air Products.(ASIAFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Air Products has broken ground on a new plant to produce nitrogen trifluoride ([NF.sub.3]), used in chamber cleaning processes for semiconductor and flat-panel manufacturing, adjacent to the company's existing facilities in Ulsan, South Korea....

GSI Group.(ASIAFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... GSI Group, a maker of motion control and laser-based components, says it will move additional laser and high-speed air-bearing spindle manufacturing operations from two of its UK facilities to Suzhou, China, by the end of this year.

Gigaphoton.(ASIAFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Gigaphoton has completed construction of a new building at is headquarters in Oyama, Japan, including a Class-1000 cleanroom wiThexpanded R&D capabilities, laser light source maintenance training, customer support administration functions, and...

Silicon Laboratories Inc. has agreed to sell its cellular communications business to NXP Semiconductors (nee Philips' chip business) for $285 million in cash, in what NXP's top exec deemed "a first step in the upcoming wireless industry consolidation.".(EUROFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Silicon Laboratories Inc. has agreed to sell its cellular communications business to NXP Semiconductors (nee Philips' chip business) for $285 million in cash, in what NXP's top exec deemed "a first step in the upcoming wireless industry...

Infineon Technologies.(EUROFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Infineon Technologies AG says that it has been selected by Nokia to supply baseband and RF chips for GSM mobile handsets. Infineon's E-Gold voice single-chip system-on-chip, combining a baseband processor, radio frequency transceiver, power...

Advanced Energy Industries Inc.(EUROFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Advanced Energy Industries Inc. said it will close its RF components operation in Stolberg, Germany, and transfer manufacturing operations mostly to facilities in China and the US by October of this year. The Stolberg location, acquired with...

A UK-based consortium of companies has won business from the DTI to research medical applications of a new MEMS microgenerator.(EUROFOCUS)(Department of Trade and Industry)(medical micro systems)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... A UK-based consortium of companies has won business from the DTI to research medical applications of a new MEMS microgenerator. The two-year "Self-Energizing Implantable Medical Micro Systems" (SIMM) project, funded with GBP 500K (US $976K)...

The Linde Group has sold BOC Edwards' Polish gases activities to Air Products and Chemicals Inc. for 370 million [euro] (~US $481.3 million).(EUROFOCUS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... The Linde Group has sold BOC Edwards' Polish gases activities to Air Products and Chemicals Inc. for 370 million [euro] (~US $481.3 million), a divestiture required by antitrust conditions arising from Linde's Sept. 2006 acquisition of the BOC...

Double, double, toil and trouble!(SPIE REPORT)
April 1, 2007... Progress in water immersion exposure technology since last year's SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium has been so convincing that its insertion into manufacturing at the 55nm and 45nm generations (as reported by Toshiba, STMicroelectronics, and...

Modeling becomes key to advanced and double-patterned lithography.(SPIE REPORT)
April 1, 2007... The prominence of a dedicated joint session and a panel discussion on "computational lithography" at this year's SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium--not to mention the recent quarter-billion-dollar purchase of Brion by ASML--illustrate the...

HP's crossbars pay off three nodes early.(TECHNOLOGY NEWS)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
April 1, 2007... In early January in Palo Alto, CA, SST editors got a peek at Hewlett-Packard's "crossbar array" technology--once considered for far future memory and logic, but now viewed as a new 15nm-width field-programmable nanowire interconnect (FPNI)...

New Surfscan system summons ghosts from the haze.(Brief article)
April 1, 2007... Building on its venerable Surfscan unpatterned-wafer-inspection legacy, the new [SP2.sup.XP] system from KLA-Tencor Corp. is designed for the 45nm IC manufacturing requirements for all types of bare wafers. The company claims the system can...

Laser annealing moves to the front burner at Ultratech.(TECHNOLOGY NEWS)
April 1, 2007... Moving beyond its pilot production efforts with logic manufacturers worldwide, Ultratech Inc. highlighted application of laser spike annealing (LSA) to DRAMs in a joint paper with Samsung at the recent IEDM conference [1]. Ultratech execs Art...

Clear Shape takes a stab at changing the shape of the DFM turf.(design for manufacturability )
April 1, 2007... The proliferation of DFM start-ups set the stage for a plethora of announcements leading up to the SPIE Microlithography Conference. Another entrant trying to alter the DFM landscape is Clear Shape Technologies, backed by several venture...

Semiconductor processing technologies find a second life in photovoltaics.(PHOTOVOLTAICS)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW More energy from sunlight hits the Earth in just one hour than the vast amount of energy consumed by all humans in an entire year. Solar energy, as a resource, dwarfs all other sources of energy. With increasing...

Re-enabling Moore's Law with re-engineered gate stacks.(Advanced transistors: Last of three parts)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW After years of struggling to delay the inevitable, it is clear that a replacement for the traditional oxide/polysilicon gate stack is needed, and sooner rather than later. Yet a review of the options finds little...

IC technologies for mixed-signal and RF SiP.(TAP: TEST/ASSEMBLY/PACKING)(radio frequency system-in-package)(integrated circuit)
April 1, 2007... Today's analog systems (PCS, Bluetooth, WLAN) have turned to a mixed-signal system-in-package (SiP) that requires specialty foundries providing advanced analog CMOS-based process technologies for better cost, performance, and time to market...

Maximizing power device yield with in situ trench depth measurement.(ETCH)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Many power devices rely on a silicon trench technology for operation. This article discusses the importance of trench depth control, provides examples of various trench etch applications, and evaluates a technique for in...

Correcting across-chip linewidth variation by mask substrate tuning.(LITHOGRAPHY)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Engineered arrays of micron-sized scattering pixels, written inside the fused silica mask substrate by a femtosecond pulsed laser, can selectively alter the effective illumination locally, correcting for CD variations at...

Circuit analysis with process variation: a DFM performance metric.(DFM)(design for manufacturability)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW The primary problem with committing to today's nanometer DFM solutions is the lack of understanding of the net benefit provided by this new generation of EDA tools. DFM tools developed to aid the designer in layout...

Database inspection of 65nm logic gate CPL masks.(PHOTOMASK)(chrome-less phase lithography)
April 1, 2007... EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW Chrome-less phase lithography (CPL) technology was introduced as a potential strong resolution enhancement technology (RET) for the application to 90 and 65nm node logic gate layers. We examined quartz (Qz) defect...

Computational litho platform.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The Tachyon 2.0 second-generation hardware-accelerated image-based (optical proximity correction) OPC and OPC verification platform supports customer roadmaps for 45nm and 32nm nodes. Tachyon 2.0 offers a 4x increase in modeling power and a...

Quanta 3D SEM/FIB Dual Beam.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The analytical DualBeam for advanced 3D research and development, the Quanta 3D FEG, combines the company's latest advances in ion and electron optics and the environmental SEM technology of the Quanta family of products. The new system...

Precision imprint litho tool.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... This Imprio 1100 high-throughput, whole-wafer, precision imprint lithography system is targeted at compound semiconductor and data storage applications. Primary applications of the technology are: patterning of photonic crystals for increased...

Sindre manufacturing system for NIL.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... Sindre, a high volume manufacturing system for nanoimprint lithography (NIL), offers a manufacturing level solution to producers of consumer products such as cameras, mobile phones, palmtops, flat screens, and next generation hard-disk drives,...

Programmable pulse power supplies.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The Pro series of programmable pulse power supplies--also called rectifiers--enable precision plating in applications where geometries are 0.1[micro]m or smaller. Frequently used in semiconductors and medical devices, the Pro Series line...

Gas detector for industrial applications.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The Series 3000 XPIS (explosion proof, intrinsically safe) robust gas detectors utilize existing two-wire systems to monitor for toxic and oxygen gas hazards in potentially flammable environments. The gas detectors require minimal sensor...

Probe card analyzer.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The new PB6800 analyzer has a 12 in. dia. tungsten carbide measurement chuck with dual cameras and extended stage travel that allows probe arrays as big as 300mm in dia. to be touched down without overhanging the chuck surface. Probilt's...

PROLITH litho optimization.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The latest version of the PROLITH lithography optimization product, PROLITH 10, enables users to predict lithography process windows for integrated circuit (IC) designs down to 32nm. Its predictive capabilities have advanced as the industry has...

Epoxy for bonding, casting, coating, and potting.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The EP30HT transparent epoxy for general purpose bonding, casting, coating, and potting combines physical strength, resistance to elevated temperatures and humidity, and chemical resistance properties with an optical clarity of over 97%...

Sapphire wafer carriers.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... These custom-fabricated sapphire wafer carriers are durable and transparent for the thinning of GaAs, indium phosphide, silicon, and other semiconductors. They are available in sizes from 2" to 6" in dia. and can be manufactured as thin as...

Dieletric gels for chip package encapsulation.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... These three low outgassing, dielectric gels, the EPM-2480, EPM-2481, and EPM-2482, were designed for the encapsulation of chip packages in devices where outgassing-related contamination poses a problem. These products cure into a soft,...

Hybrid nanopositioning translation stage.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The M-511.HD hybrid nanopositioning translation stage overcomes the limitations of conventional precision positioning systems by combining the piezoflexure drive advantages of unlimited resolution and rapid response with long travel ranges of...

Micro-objective focusing system.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... The MIPOS 500 UD micro-objective focusing system is for applications requiring upside-down operation such as inverted microscopes. Its design, which is free of mechanical play, provides a total travel of 500[micro]m and provides a high...

Thermoplastic material for CMP rings.(PRODUCT NEWS)
April 1, 2007... PEEK thermoplastic materials can be used in CMP (chemical mechanical planarization) retaining rings. These materials have inherent purity, strength, chemical resistance, and wear resistance. The PEEK polymer can be machined to tight tolerances...

Rethinking the chip industry business model: collaborate or else.(INDUSTRY FORUM)
April 1, 2007... The tectonic plates beneath the semiconductor industry are shifting faster and more extensively than ever before. Much of the demand is coming from fast-changing, fad-driven consumer applications. Market forces require that electronic systems...