Most Viewed Articles for the Week of August 11, 2008

Teradyne unveiled not just one, but five new products this week and re-entered the memory test arena; Applied Materials is expecting a drop in FPD equipment orders, but said solar equipment revenue is rebounding; and Sematech researchers have created a chemically amplified EUV resist that can achieve a 22 nm half-pitch resolution. Also, S. Korean engineers claim to have designed the first-ever
3-D IC, and SV Solar opens its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. More

IBM Takes Gloves Off for 32 nm Low-Power Competition With TSMC
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 6/26/2008

IBM engineers returned home from the 2008 Symposium on VLSI Technology to argue that its adoption of a gate-first high-k/metal gate implementation at the 32 nm generation will put IBM and its partners ahead of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC, Hsinchu, Taiwan). More

Flip-Chip Changes on the Horizon
Sally Cole Johnson, Contributing Editor — Semiconductor International, 7/2/2008

Demand for flip-chips is on the rise thanks, in part, to a spike in gold-bonding wire costs. "Significant trends are taking place because the cost of gold wire is increasing," explained Raj Pendse, STATS ChipPAC's (Singapore) vice president of flip-chip and emerging products. "Mobile products or platforms that traditionally used wire bonding, 3-D and stacked die are now an area in which we see future growth potential." More

Thin-Film Photovoltaics Capture More of the Spectrum
Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media — Semiconductor International, 7/1/2008

Thin-film solar cells are on the rise for several reasons, not the least of which is a polysilicon shortage that has kept an already rapidly growing solar industry from realizing more of its potential. Some thin-film technologies use no silicon at all, relying instead on materials such as cadmium telluride (CdTe) or copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS). More

Obducat Rolls Sindre for Patterned Media
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 7/7/2008

A new competition is emerging in the nanoimprint lithography (NIL) space between Obducat AB (Malmö, Sweden) and Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII, Austin, Texas). The two companies are competing to supply nanoimprint systems to the hard disk drive (HDD) media vendors. The HDD industry is moving to media (disks) that use discrete track recording (DTR), with the concentric tracks patterned by specially configured NIL systems. More

Intel May Be Pushing Applied to Buy ASMI
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 6/9/2008

Applied Materials offered $400M-$500M for ASMI's atomic layer deposition (ALD) and plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) activities. Gartner Inc. semiconductor manufacturing analyst Dean Freeman said ASMI has ALD patents that Applied may need as it broadens its own ALD thrust. More

Physical Analysis Provides Images of 45 nm
Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief — Semiconductor International, 5/6/2008

Engineers at Chipworks Inc. (Ottawa, Canada) have uncovered physical details of the 65 and 45 nm process technologies, including different ways that strain is being implemented and the complexities of high-k/metal gate integration. The engineers looked at two 45 nm chips: the Intel Xeon and Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. UniPhier parts. More

Competing Lithography Technologies Share Heartaches
Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media — Semiconductor International, 5/21/2008

At the Sematech Litho Forum (Bolton Landing, N.Y.), much of the debate had to do with the issues that the various techniques have in common — including business models in the face of huge development costs, shared infrastructures, R&D dollars, and lithography roadmap roadblocks. More

VLSI Research Ranks Top Equipment Vendors
Staff — Semiconductor International, 6/11/2008

VLSI Research Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) announced the results of its annual customer satisfaction survey by vendors of process diagnostics equipment and small and large suppliers of wafer processing equipment. VLSI Research said the top-rated suppliers in the three categories are Keithley Instruments (Cleveland), SEN Corp. (Tokyo) and Varian Semiconductor (Gloucester, Mass.). More

What's Your Solar Story?
Aaron Hand, Executive Editor, Electronic Media — Semiconductor International, 7/17/2008

Officially, SEMICON West had more than 250 exhibitors with offerings for both the photovoltaics and semiconductor markets. But nearly every exhibitor had some sort of solar story to tell. Here is a sampling of what was highlighted on the show floor. More

MII Tackles Patterned Media Opportunity
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 5/22/2008

Molecular Imprints Inc. (MII, Austin, Texas) has received multiple orders for its newly developed Imprio 2200 system, aimed at pilot production of hard disk drive (HDD) media. Discrete track recording (DTR) will enter the pilot production stage soon, providing vendors of nanoimprint lithography (NIL) with a market that is expected to total hundreds of imprint tools. More

Freescale Taking RCP to Pilot Production Stage
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 5/12/2008

After six years of development, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas) is moving its pioneering redistributed chip packaging (RCP) technology to early commercial production, said Navjot Chhabra, RCP operations manager. RCP will move to volume production in the first quarter of 2009 at Tempe, where Freescale has built a 12,000 ft² RCP production facility with a capacity of ~800,000 units per week. More

Memory Moves to Megafabs for NAND
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 7/17/2008

All over SEMICON West, companies were discussing wafer processing tools, automation equipment and other pieces of the chip manufacturing infrastructure. The target: big memory megafabs. The trend to go large has huge implications, affecting the debate over 450 mm wafers as well. More

Chrome Going the Way of the Dodo Bird?
David Lammers, News Editor — Semiconductor International, 7/29/2008

Chrome, which has served the photomask industry well for decades, may gradually be displaced by a better metal: molybdenum silicide (MoSi). Franklin Kalk, CTO at Toppan Photomasks Inc. (Round Rock, Texas), said he knows of two semiconductor companies that plan to use MoSi for 32 nm logic production starting next year. More

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

MEMS will become a $7.6B business this year, as more and more developing consumer applications go into large-volume production, predicts Yole Développement (Lyon, France). The high-volume consumer market will bring with it a 25% jump in unit shipments, which will be countered by a relentless 6-7% overall decline in prices. More

EM-Induced Failures in Plastic Encapsulated IC Packages
William Eslinger, Boston Scientific, St. Paul, Minn. — Semiconductor International, 6/1/2008

A commercial CMOS digital potentiometer IC in an eight-pin small outline transistor package was demonstrating field failures after ~1 month of operation. Systematic failure analysis led to the identification of the failure mechanism: post-manufacture, metal migration inside the plastic-encapsulated package. More

Applied Breaks Ground on Singapore Center
Staff — Semiconductor International, 7/8/2008

Applied Materials Inc. broke ground on construction of the company's Singapore operations facility, which is expected to be completed in late 2009. The 32,000 m² facility in the Changi North Industrial Park will serve as a hub for Applied's business activities throughout Asia. More

Roadmap Signals Showstoppers
Laura Peters, Editor-in-Chief — Semiconductor International, 7/17/2008

The overall theme of the 2008 update to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) is a slight slowdown of gate-length scaling for high-performance and low-standby power devices, but the low-power device target dates will not change. At the ITRS presentations during SEMICON West, chairs of each of the individual technology working groups (TWGs) summarized pivotal changes in this year's roadmap. More