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.

Luminescent Technologies, Inc., a computational lithography company, has broadened its reach by announcing the industry’s first offline computational photomask inspection product (unofficially named LAIPH for Luminescent Automated Image Processing Hub). A “premier company in Asia” is the first customer to qualify the new computational defect review product in volume production. According to a Luminescent representative, […]

At the SEMICON West 2009 Device Scaling TechXPOT, moderated by this editor, SEMATECH’s Ray Jammy reviewed the latest results in scaling CMOS transistors. “We are litererally running out of atoms,” explained Jammy. “You can see the number of atoms in a gate dielectric.” When you have such thin layers, how do you control device parameters? […]

Leaving California for the first time, the 12th annual IEEE International Interconnect Technology Conference (IITC) will take place in Sapporo, Japan, June 1-3. With lithographic shrinks in 2D dimensions slowing, interconnects between chips in packages and in 3D stacks will be the driver for increased density and functionality in ICs. Thus, the more than 80 […]

IMEC has successfully transferred memory variability aware modeling (MemoryVAM), the first EDA tool for statistical memory analysis, to Samsung Electronics. The tool predicts yield loss of embedded SRAMs caused by the process variations of deep-submicron IC technologies. This may be the first proven design-for-manufacturing (DFM) tool to provide statistical analysis across degrees of abstraction from […]

The SPIE Europe Microtechnologies For the New Millennium congress has new partners this year, with the involvement of GMM, the Society of Microelectronics, Micro and Precision Engineering and the magazine mst|news as Cooperating Organisations for the first time. The event will be held at the Congress Centre Maritim Hotel in Dresden, Germany, 4-6 May 2009. […]

The control of complex interdependencies is critical for the successful manufacturing of nanometer-scale ICs. Every aspect of every unit process step in the line must be ever more tightly controlled to ensure that 45nm and 32nm node chips can be made with good yield. To serve the market, Novellus continues to announce new integrated surface-treatment […]

Semilab, founded in 1990 and headquartered in Budapest, Hungary, is spending cash to continue to expand its portfolio of fab metrology offerings. Today, the company announced it has acquired Advanced Metrology Systems (AMS) and QC Solutions. The two Massachusetts-based metrology companies expand Semilab’s family of scalable, flexible solutions to help semiconductor and solar manufacturers characterize […]

German and French teams are combining EUR 14.5m investment into development of strained-silicon on insulator (sSOI) technology under the DEvice and CIrcuit performance boosted through SIlicon material Fabrication (DECISIF) program. The work will combine original research results from Research Center Juelich and Leti/Soitec to try to lower costs and defect-densities in the creation of 300mm […]