At SEMICON West this year, July 14-16 in San Francisco, the Chemical and Gas Manufacturers Group (CGMG) Committee of SEMI have organized an excellent program covering “Contamination Control in the Sub-20nm Era” to occur in the afternoon of the 14th as part of the free TechXPOT series. Recent high-volume manufacturing (HVM) developments have shown much tighter IC control specifications in terms of particles, metal contaminants, and organic contaminants. The session…
Ed’s Threads
Nakamura on blue light history and future
Nobel Laureate Shuji Nakamura provided the keynote address to the attendees at the 57th annual Electronic Materials Conference held this week in Columbus, Ohio. His talk on “The History and Developments of InGaN-based LEDs and Laser Diodes” informed and entertained the audience of materials researchers, particularly since he followed first-principles of materials science and his natural inspiration to create the world’s first commercially viable blue LEDs over 20 years ago.…
ALD of Crystalline High-K SHTO on Ge
Alternative channel materials (ACM) such as germanium (Ge) will need to be integrated into future CMOS ICs, and one part of the integration was shown at the recent Materials Research Society (MRS) spring meeting by John Ekerdt, Associate Dean for Research in Chemical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, in his presentation on “Atomic Layer Deposition of Crystalline SrHfxTi1-xO3 Directly on Ge (001) for High-K Dielectric Applications.” Strontium…
Bottoms-up ELD of Cobalt Plugs
As reported in more detail at Solid State Technology, during the IEEE IITC now happening in Grenoble, imec and Lam showed a new Electroless Deposition (ELD) cobalt (Co) process that is claimed to provide void-free bottoms-up pre-filling of vias and contacts. The unit-process is intended to be integrated into flows to produce scaled interconnects for logic and DRAM ICs at the 7nm node and below. Co-incidentally at IITC this year,…
CMP Slurry Trade-offs in R&D
As covered at SemiMD.com, the CMP Users Group (of the Northern California Chapter of The American Vacuum Society) recently held a meeting in Albany, New York in collaboration with CNSE, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, and SEMATECH. Among the presentations were deep dives into the inherent challenges of CMP slurry R&D. Daniel Dickmann of Ferro Corporation discussed trade-offs in designing CMP slurries in his presentation, “Advances in Ceria Slurries to Address Challenges…
Batteries? We don’t need no stinking batteries.
We’re still used to thinking that low-power chips for “mobile” or “Internet-of-Things (IoT)” applications will be battery powered…but the near ubiquity of lithium-ion cells powering batteries could be threatened by capacitors and energy-harvesting circuits connected to photovoltaic/thermoelectric/piezoelectric micro-power sources. At ISSCC2015 in San Francisco last week, there were several presentations on novel chip designs that run on mere milliWatts (µW) of power, and the most energy efficient circuit blocks now…
Oscar for DMD Inventor Hornbeck
Kudos to Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck, the extended team at Texas Instruments (TI) that has worked on Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) technology, and to the TI executives who continued to fund the R&D through years of initial investment losses. Hornbeck has been awarded an Academy Award® of Merit (Oscar® statuette) for his contribution to revolutionizing how motion pictures are created, distributed, and viewed using DMD technology (branded as the DLP®…
Micro-Buckled 3D Silicon Scaffolds
A new silicon microstructural solution announced this month is so powerful in creating 3D patterns from 2D surface machining that I just have to share. The figure shows 3D silicon microstructures formed by compressive buckling. The method can be used to create objects with features as small as 100 nm that could be useful for developing new technologies for medicine, energy storage and even brain-like electronic networks. Note that the…
Ferromagnetic Room Temperature Switching
Bismuth-ferrite could make spin-valves that use 1/10th the power of STT A research team led by folks at Cornel University (along with University of California, Berkeley; Tsinghua University; and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) have discovered how to make a single-phase multiferroic switch out of bismuth ferrite (BiFeO3) as shown in an online letter to Nature. Multiferroics, allowing for the control of magnetism with an electric field, have…
NanoParticle Self-Assembly at UofM
Theory and Practice synergize R&D Sharon C. Glotzer and Nicholas A. Kotov are both researchers at the University of Michigan who were just awarded a MRS Medal at the Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting in San Francisco for their work on “Integration of Computation and Experiment for Discovery and Design of Nanoparticle Self-Assembly.” Due to the fact that surface atoms compose a large percent of the mass of nanoparticles,…
