Fab Repurposing Raises New Opportunities
Thomas Morrow, SEMI Vice President Global Expositions and Marketing, SEMI, San Jose — Semiconductor International, 6/20/2008

Although new 300 mm fabs dominate the headlines, 200 mm fabs continue to do much of the heavy lifting in the global semiconductor market. In fact, 200 mm wafer capacity still exceeds 300 mm capacity in equivalent units. More

Energy Conservation Yields Rapid Payback in Today's Fabs
Thomas Morrow, SEMI Vice President of Global Expositions and Marketing, SEMI, San Jose — Semiconductor International, 6/20/2008

Today's most advanced fabs have opportunities for energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gases. In many cases, taking advantage of the opportunities requires close collaboration with equipment and subsystem providers to achieve optimum results, but the payback can be significant and swift. More

Consumer Applications Push MEMS to New Volumes
SEMI, San Jose — Semiconductor International, 6/20/2008

Leading MEMS producers report on their new devices for consumer applications and the emerging processes necessary to make and test them at consumer market prices in Tuesday's Emerging Markets TechXPOT at SEMICON West. More

Productivity Solutions Highlight Best of West Awards
Thomas Morrow, Vice President of Global Expositions and Marketing, SEMI, San Jose — Semiconductor International, 6/20/2008

Several finalists for SEMI's inaugural Best of West awards focus on productivity improvements in the semiconductor design-to-production flow. More

OmniVision, TSMC Develop Sensor Technology
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 5/27/2008

OmniVision Technologies Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), working with foundry partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan), developed CMOS image sensor technology that will use a fully depreciated 0.11 µm fab and standard tools to manufacture backside illumination image sensors. More

Yield, Surface Prep for Nano Devices
Ahmed Busnaina, Director, The NSF Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center — Semiconductor International, 6/1/2008

Nanoscale emerging research devices in the "beyond CMOS scaling" realm require knowledge about how they will be manufactured, including yield issues and what the future holds for surface preparation and cleaning. More

Visionox Readies First Volume OLED Line
Yao Gang, Editor-in-Chief, SI China — Semiconductor International, 6/11/2008

Visionox Technology Co. (Beijing, China), a pioneer in the organic light-emitting diode (OLED) field in China, said its volume OLED production line will be put into operation in October. The facility will have an annual capacity of more than 10 million small-size OLED devices. More

Samsung Investing $908M in Memory Line Upgrade
Ann Steffora Mutschler, Senior Editor — Electronic News, 5/27/2008

Samsung Electronics (Seoul, South Korea) approved a $908M plan to expand and upgrade its existing memory lines. More

A Better Way to Manage Test Wafers
Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief — Semiconductor International, 5/8/2008

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.) engineer Aziza Faruqi outlined a methodology to decrease the inventory of test wafers (TWs), improve TW lifecycle and automate TW management in fab operations. She spoke at the Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC), held last month in Cambridge, Mass. More

Applied Shifts 200 mm Manufacturing, Refurbishing to Dedicated Line
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 3/25/2008

Applied Materials Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has shifted 200 mm equipment production for both new and refurbished machines to a dedicated line at its Austin facility. More

Most Viewed Articles for the Week of June 16, 2008

Unsolicited bids are popular recently, with both Applied Materials and Cadence going after companies that refuse to profess their mutual love. In this week’s top news, Applied reiterates that it’s still interested in ASM International, and Cadence goes public with an offer that Mentor Graphics turned down months ago. Other top articles include Intel’s news that it will join the solar race, Spansion’s move from DRAM to flash, and IMEC’s simplified high-k/metal gates. More