Soft plasmas for monolayer etching by Ed Korczynski at NCCAVS PAG meeting at SEMICON/West 2010, including TEL Tactras RLSA and AMAT AdvantEdge Mesa for HKMG 32nm, STI, and bWL etches.

ALD/CVD systems for new materials R&D by Altatech Semiconductor sold to Fraunhofer IZM ASSID and ENAS for 3DIC and high mobility research using liquid injection of precursors.

Intel shows vertical integration pays off with air-gaps through manufacturing cost reduction in low-k dielectrics for 32nm and 22nm node IC interconnects.

HP Labs in Palo Alto has been leading the development of the “memristor,” and researchers there have finally discovered the underlying mechanism for the formation of devices that can function as memory cells, logic circuits, and potentially even real artificial intelligence (AI)! Disclosing these results in his plenary speech to the attendees at the Nanocontacts […]

The 2010 SPIE Advanced Lithography conference is where we first get glimpses of the future of nano-scale patterning technology for manufacturing. Sometimes, many fuzzy blobs come into focus as a picture in a single moment, and Yan Borodovsky of Intel showed how to do 22nm node litho the day before SPIE officially started. At both […]

The upcoming Spring Materials Research Society (MRS) Meeting in San Francisco will feature a separate “Nanocontact and Nanointerconnects Workshop” to explore the biggest secret about the smallest devices: for the near-term there’s nothing better than standard metal. The workshop will address both theoretical and experimental approaches to formation, carrier transport, and reliability, and so will […]

Another back-to-the-future possibility for next-generation lithography (NGL) is direct write e-beam (DWEB), revitalized with multibeam clusters, curvilinear mask writing, and character projection (CP). The E-beam Initiative used the recent SPIE gathering to announce that it had added six new member companies, including GlobalFoundries and Samsung. Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S and Managing Director of the […]

This year’s plenary sessions of the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium exposed the complexities of patterning ICs in high-volume manufacturing (HVM) at the 22nm node and beyond. Steppers using 193nm ArF immersion (193i) will be extended using double-patterning (DP) schemes, since the extreme-ultra-violet litho (EUVL) infrastructure is again delayed. R&D to support DP integration has led […]

Molecular Imprints, Inc, announced their first nanopatterning tool designed for pilot and volume production of patterned hard disc drive (HDD) substrates at the SPIE Advanced Lithography Symposium in San Jose, CA February 22. The NuTera HD7000 uses Jet and Flash Imprint Lithography (J-FIL) technology to print over 300 double sided disks per hour up to […]

The SPIE’s 7th Frits Zernike Award for Advances in Optical Microlithography goes to M. David Levenson, BetaSights Litho & DFM Editor, in recognition of one of the most important developments in lithography resolution enhancement of the last twenty years, the phase shifting mask (PSM). About 30 years ago at the IBM San Jose Lab, Levenson […]