Semiconductors

Carbonics, Inc. today announced that carbon nanotube technology has for the first time achieved speeds exceeding 100GHz in-radio frequency (RF) applications. The milestone eclipses the performance – and efficiency – of traditional RF-CMOS technology that is ubiquitous in modern consumer electronics including cell phones. The news opens the door for this new technology to potentially provide a powerful boost for 5G and mm-Wave technologies. The milestone was reported in the paper, “Wafer-scalable, aligned carbon nanotube transistors operating at frequencies of over 100 GHz,” published this week in the journal, Nature Electronics. A separate commentary in Nature Electronics called the research “a remarkable technology milestone.”

ETEL, a direct drive motor manufacturer of the HEIDENHAIN Group, now offers updated ironless linear motors optimized for electronics and semiconductor manufacturing. Called the IL+ product lines, these motors are offered in the same profile as ETEL’s previously established ironless linear motors but now specially re-designed to allow for increased performance to benefit these two industries. Unique to the IL+, a change in material selection now allows the ETEL ironless motors to operate up to 600VDC and reach a temperature limit up to 130°C, as opposed to the previous market standard of 300VDC and 80°C. This allows an increase in overall speed along with a greater force operating range. Track sizes are available in increments of 128, 256, and 512mm.

SEMI and TechSearch International today announced a new edition of the Worldwide OSAT Manufacturing Sites Database – the only outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (OSAT) supplier database available in the market. The report, an essential business tool for anyone interested in device packaging, tracks facilities that provide packaging and testing services to the semiconductor industry. The new edition includes more than 80 updates spanning packaging technology offerings, product specialization and ownership/shareholder updates. Adding more than 30 new test facility additions to bring the total number of facilities tracked to 360, the database helps semiconductor manufacturers identify service offerings around the globe, an increasingly important task in supply chain management.

Cree, Inc. (Nasdaq: CREE) and STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications,announced today the expansion and extension of an existing multi-year, long-term silicon carbide (SiC) wafer supply agreement to more than $500 million. The extended agreement is a doubling in value of the original agreement for the supply of Cree’s advanced 150mm silicon carbide bare and epitaxial wafers to STMicroelectronics over the next several years. The increased wafer supply enables the semiconductor leaders to address the rapidly growing demand for silicon carbide power devices globally, particularly in automotive and industrial applications.

Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) have found many uses in electronics and new touch screen devices. Carbon nanotubes are sheets of one atom-thick layer of graphene rolled up seamlessly into different sizes and shapes. To be able to use them in commercial products like transparent transistors for phone screens, researchers need to be able to easily test nanotubes for their materials properties, and the new method helps with this. Professor Esko I. Kauppinen’s group at Aalto has years of experience in making carbon nanotubes for electronic applications. The team’s unique method uses aerosols of metal catalysts and gasses containing carbon. This aerosol-based method allows the researchers to carefully control the nanotube structure directly.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have developed a new method for producing atomically-thin semiconducting crystals that could one day enable more powerful and compact electronic devices. By using specially-treated silicon surfaces to tailor the crystals’ size and shape, the researchers have found a potentially faster and less expensive way to produce next-generation semiconductor crystals for microchips. The crystalline materials produced this way could in turn enable new scientific discoveries and accelerate technological developments in quantum computing, consumer electronics, and higher efficiency solar cells and batteries.