Innovalight specialty PV materials company gets acquired by DuPont after successful integration of its silicon-ink screen-printed selective emitter (SE) into mulitple customer crystalline-silicon production lines.

SPIE Advanced Lithography 2011 showed few new tools or techniques, but many new materials and integration tricks to extend 193i into double-patterning for IC HVM, while EUV and DSA developments continue according to expert Dr. M. David Levenson of BetaSights.

For 32nm and 22nm node ICs, Applied Materials’ FCVD and Novellus Systems’ CFD technologies provide gapfill, sidewall spacers, and conformal oxides for logic and NAND, plus SSDP litho.

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 Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting in San Francisco is so huge, this year attracting a record of over 5,000 attendees, that strategy is needed to try to see any representative sample of the event. To provide in-depth information about new materials technologies, new symposia have been added over the years such that there […]

The first example of all-optical signal processing for communication above 100Gbit/s using silicon-based devices has been published in the April issue of Nature Photonics. Using deep-ultraviolet lithography, standard CMOS processing and organic molecular beam deposition, researchers from the University of Karlsruhe, IMEC and its associated laboratory INTEC at Ghent University, Lehigh University and ETH Zurich […]

sp3 Diamond Technologies – the supplier of diamond film products, equipment, and services – today announced it is taking orders for 50mm and 100mm silicon on diamond (SOD) wafers for use as Gallium Nitride (GaN) substrates. Having worked with Nitronix on the GaN, sp3 Diamond Technologies uses combinations of thin-film depositions, wafer thinning, and layer […]

Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) collects and reports market size information for key sectors of the semiconductor ecosystem. It recently issued figures for the materials market, which in 2008 totaled $42.7 billion, essentially flat with the prior year. According to SEMI, rapidly slowing economic conditions in the fourth quarter squelched prospects for year-over-year growth […]