Features

Wednesday 1st December 2004

November saw the 100th anniversary of the vacuum tube that led to the birth of the electronics industry. David Ridsdale looks at how the vacuum continues to be a vital key for manufacturing both now and in the future

Wednesday 1st December 2004

Moving to any new technology node carries challenges. The move to 300mm manufacturing has become a watershed experience for the microelectronics industry. Wil Josquin, VP Industrial Strategy and Flexibility at Philips Semiconductors discuses the importance of APC and standards to ensure right-first-time 300mm wafers

Wednesday 1st December 2004

The financial markets are still hearing mixed reviews from the semiconductor industry on the outlook for 2005, ranging from marginal growth to contraction on a year-on-year basis. Based on our investigation, we believe that 1H:05 should still deliver positive growth in terms of chip sales, before contracting in 2Q:05 to deliver a sequential q/q downturn in 2H:05. So far, we have seen some chipmakers, such as the foundries in Asia and some of the IDMs (integrated device manufacturers) lower their earnings outlook for FY05 and as a result, lowered 2005 capital spending plans. These cuts will first be for capacity/volume related chip production but would then move on to advanced production using cutting-edge technology if the downturn prolongs indefinitely

Wednesday 1st December 2004

Significant progress has been made in readying atomic layer deposition for manufacturing. Drs Tom Seidel and Sasangan Ramanathan of thin-film deposition equipment manufacturer Genus report.

Wednesday 1st December 2004

Pattern-limited yield could scupper the industry's attempts to use 65nm technology to keep up with Moore's Law, writes Dr Kevin Monahan, vice president of KLA-Tencor's technology, patterning solutions group.

Wednesday 1st December 2004

Nanotechnology is currently an industry buzz word with a lot of hype and hope. A forum to discuss the potential of this emerging technology was held in the USA recently. Dick James of Chipworks was in Texas and provided this report for European Semiconductor...

Monday 1st November 2004

Critical layer masks are valuable objects because they are extremely difficult to produce and are vital to the success of any device. Emmanuel Rausa, Photomask Manager of Unaxis describes the challenges in terms of dry etch.

Monday 1st November 2004

Agere Systems says that its engineers have found the right mix of packaging ingredients to enable the semiconductor industry to successfully implement lead-free packaging. Dr Mike Cooke reports

Monday 1st November 2004

Companies need to be involved in the environmental legislation process if they are to fight the enactment of laws based on faulty or insufficient data, writes Keith Huckle, global product steward and risk manager, Dow Corning

Monday 1st November 2004

The benefits that process control and integrated sensor data can bring to semiconductor device processing have been widely publicised. Difficulties in connectivity, however, have prevented wide-spread implementation of these tools.

Monday 1st November 2004

Improvements in silicon micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) technology, wafer level assembly and test enable both the reduction of current packaging costs and reductions in size.

Friday 1st October 2004

The mix of memory products, DRAM, SRAM, and Flash combined with a mix of test methodologies, I/O compression, FPC, RPC, and BIST presents a complex test profile. To meet the issues facing memory manufacturers today, testers at wafer sort require a broad range of capabilities, writes Sam Wong, senior applications engineer at Agilent Technologies.

Friday 1st October 2004

Chemical Mechanical Planarisation (CMP) is older than the semiconductor industry and was retired to an obscure history in the early development of semiconductors. Instead the technology has become the second most expensive part of the manufacturing process and a key enabler for the future of the industry. David Ridsdale takes a look at the past, present and future of the technology.

Friday 1st October 2004

The semiconductor industry has historically been fraught with insidious cycles as the pendulum swings from one peak to another valley. Robert Castellano is from the Information Network in the USA and covers the global semiconductor market. He comments on the state of the industry and points out that the global market has created global cycles

Friday 1st October 2004

It is becoming apparent that the future of lithography is to use Hyper-NA (Numerical Appeture) 193nm immersion systems to handle needs up to the 32nm node. Such systems can have NA > 1.2. At such hyper-NA values, correct modelling of polarisation effects is critical to understanding the benefits as well as limitations of polarisation choices. Peter Brooker and John Lewellen of SIGMA-C and Yuri Aksenov of Philips Research Leuven investigate different source polarisation and chrome biasing options for printing 45nm lines through pitch in resist

Wednesday 1st September 2004

As semiconductor manufacturers push to the 90nm node and beyond they will require increasingly higher resolution in the imaging techniques they use to analyse defects and develop and monitor manufacturing processes. Current imaging workhorses such as the scanning electron microscope (SEM) are inadequate for imaging structures such as gate oxides and barrier seed layers that may be only Angstroms thick. Other techniques are high cost and time consuming. Ted Tessner of FEI describes how his company aims to overcome these shortcomings through its High Throughput Atomic Resolution Analysis (HTARA) technique

Wednesday 1st September 2004

Researchers around the world cry out for more money to carry out their research. Unfortunately there is a limited amount of cash that governments and industry are prepared to spend. Mike Cooke reviews Don Braben's new book, "Pioneering Research - A Risk Worth Taking", that makes the case that some of this money should be put on open-ended projects that could lead to new types of industrial activity

Wednesday 1st September 2004

The cyclical nature of the microelectronics industry is normally described in economic terms only, but there are many aspects of the food chain impacted by the boom and bust nature of the industry, not least the changing fortunes of the workforce. David Stone of Microscape Recruitment discusses the types of individuals companies are looking for and how individuals looking for new challenges may have the nature as well as the skills a company seeks

Wednesday 1st September 2004

Resistivity and Hall voltage measurements are key to determining the effectiveness of doping and thermal activation processes in semiconductor production. Keithley describes some of the factors that go in to making precise four-point measurements.

Wednesday 1st September 2004

Getting the components of any industry to work together requires standards. SEMI is the leading body developing standards for the semiconductor production industry. SEMI Europe's Standards Manager, Carlos Lee, explains why you should get involved in the process.

Sunday 1st August 2004

Kulicke & Soffa looks at how the company has changed and is moving beyond its leading packaging and assembly technology. With decreasing linewidths approaching, they are ready to tackle interconnect package testing.

Sunday 1st August 2004

JEMI UK began as a small group of UK semiconductor related companies who got together to ensure competitive was retained They held the first Semiconductor conference in 2000 and since that time the annual event in Edinburgh has developed into one of the better networking events for the European community. David Ridsdale reports on the event.

Sunday 1st August 2004

Every year at Semicon West there is a theme that develops throughout the show. Despite the best intentions of organisers and attendees to push a certain agenda the show always provides its own emphasis reflecting concerns in the industry. David Ridsdale reports on what was bothering the industry in 2004.

Sunday 1st August 2004

In the last couple of months there have been a number of changes in the views of some of the leading semiconductor industry analysts. Dr Mike Cooke surveys the semiconductor flight path