August 31, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

I’m on a train from Madrid to Valencia, Spain, where I will attend the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference and Exhibition this week. As I look out over the rolling hills, I’m reminded of another solar event on the beautiful land surrounding San Francisco. As a pleasant final cap to a grueling SEMICON West/Intersolar North America week in mid-July, I joined Advanced Energy (Fort Collins, Colo.) for a tour of Cline Cellars, a winery in Sonoma, Calif.

We got the standard Cline Cellars tour, complete with the history of what was once a mission site, as well as fascinating tidbits about how wine is made. But our tour stopped perhaps longer than most do when they reach the site of th...Read More

August 13, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

For the SEMICON West Daily News, I reported on the Tuesday afternoon Device Scaling TechXPOT, which featured presentations and panel discussion on lithography options at 22 nm. Although I wanted to include comments from moderator Lars Liebmann, I had to cut back to make the story fit on one page (all the news that fits, right?). Granted, lithographers and their suppliers have a mighty difficult task ahead of them, but Liebmann had a particular knack for making each technology candidate look bad — and for upsetting several participants and attendees along the way.

This TechXPOT session offered up six speakers to present on six potential lithography routes: immersi...Read More

July 17, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (5)

As expected, Moscone West was hopping this year more than I’ve ever seen it. As I mentioned in my last post about Intersolar, SEMI has made attempts in the past to get people to venture out of the North and South halls, but the beer gardens and oompah bands nonetheless left the packaging suppliers in the West feeling a bit unloved. This year was different. The solar pull was just too strong, and people were coming over in droves.

Perhaps no exhibitor epitomizes this shift better than our industry’s own dominant player, Applied Materials. It was hard to avoid the buzz they created at SEMICON West this year. Even sitting at the Lithography Brea...Read More

July 8, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (2)

Carl Zeiss SMT (Oberkochen, Germany) recently designated Schott Lithotec (Jena, Germany) as its latest Supply Chain Partner. The official press release talked about what the new status meant: “expanding our long-term relationship and business”, “we will jointly fine tune our technologies”, and strengthening the “historic business relation”. But, particularly with Schott Lithotec’s highly pivotal role in the viability of high-index immersion lithography, I was curious to know what the Partner designation really meant.

There ...Read More

July 8, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

SEMICON West, one of our busiest shows of the year, just keeps getting busier. We used to have five days to cover everything — Monday through Wednesday up in San Francisco covering the front end, heading down to San Jose Wednesday night to finish out the week in the back end. And those were the days before Semiconductor International took over the show daily, and before SEMI started up its TechXPOT programs. Now we have just three days to get and write all the news we can for the show’s printed Daily News, our own ongoing online news and daily NewsBreak newsletters — not to mention the usual bit of face time with the sources that help us out so much throughout the year.

(I know. You’ve taken out your violins,...Read More