With sadness I post that Daniel J. Rose, Ph.D.—founder of Rose Associates—passed away on September 20, 2016, due to complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Dan Rose received a Ph.D. in materials engineering from the University of British Columbia, and subsequently spent five years managing packaging manufacturing operations at Fairchild Semiconductor. He worked with and become friends with industry luminaries such as Intel’s founder Robert Noyce, and National Semiconductor’s founder Charlie Sporck.…
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Process Watch: Salami slicing your yield
By David W. Price and Douglas G. Sutherland Author’s Note: The Process Watch series explores key concepts about process control—defect inspection and metrology—for the semiconductor industry. Following the previous installments, which examined the 10 fundamental truths of process control, this new series of articles highlights additional trends in process control, including successful implementation strategies and the benefits for IC manufacturing. Introduction In a previous Process Watch article [1], we showed…
Fish-Scale Piezo Generators
Piezoelectric generators are based on thin-films of structured materials that can convert pressure into electricity. Inorganic crystals such as aluminum-nitride (AlN) barium titanate (BT) and lead-zirconium-titanate (PZT) have long been explored as piezoelectric films for various applications. Now researchers Sujoy Kumar Ghosh and Dipankar Mandal at the Jadavpur University in Kolkata, India have shown that fish scales (FSC) can be used to build a flexible bio-piezoelectric nanogenerator (BPNG) capable of…
Patterning with Films and Chemicals
Somewhere around 40nm is the limit on the smallest half-pitch feature that can be formed with a single-exposure of 193-nm wavelength laser light using water immersion (193i) lithography. While multiple-patterning (MP) is needed to achieve tighter half-pitches, smaller features at the same pitch can be formed using technology extensions of 193i. “Chemistry is key player in lithography process,” is the title of a short video presentation by Dow Electronic Materials…
ASM’s Haukka ALD Award
Dr. Suvi Haukka, executive scientist at ASM International, located in Finland, was awarded the ALD Innovation prize at the ALD 2016 Ireland conference (Figure), as chosen by the conference chairs. Haukka has had a lifetime career in Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD), starting at Microchemistry Ltd. with ALD pioneer Dr. Tuomo Suntola in 1990, and now holding over 100 patents. Since ASM bought Microchemistry in 1999, Haukka has worked on the…
The Last Technology Roadmap
After many delays, the last ever International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has been published. Now that there are just a few companies remaining in the world developing new fab technologies in each of the CMOS logic and memory spaces, each leading-edge company has a secret internal roadmap and little motivation to compare directions within fiercely competitive commercial markets. Solid State Technology Chief Editor Pete Singer covered these developments in…
Etch Abatement Needed at 200mm Fabs to Meet WSC Goals for 2020
I’m delighted to turn the blog over again to Mike Czerniak, Environmental Solutions Business Development Manager at Edwards. A longtime champion of the environment, Mike, nominated by the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), was just been accepted as the ‘expert witness’ on CF4 for the forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) working party on emissions of this extremely long-lived gas (50,000 years). Etch Abatement Needed at 200mm…
Broadening Scope of SEMICON
Once upon a time, SEMICONs were essentially just for semiconductor manufacturing business and technology, and predominantly CMOS ICs. Back when we followed public roadmaps for technology to maintain the cadence of new manufacturing nodes in support of Moore’s Law, it was sufficient to focus on faster transistors connected with tighter wires. Now in an era that is at least partially “More-than-Moore”—as we like to refer to heterogeneous integration of non-CMOS…
Dow Kills CIGS Solar Shingles
The mega-merger between Dow and DuPont has already shaken out an under-performing product line: Powerhouse(TM) solar singles. As reported at PVTech, over 100 jobs in Milpitas, California and in Midland, Michigan will be lost along with the production line that assembles the copper-indium-gallium-sulfide (CIGS) cells into thin-film Building-Integrated PhotoVoltaic (BIPV) rooftop shingles. BIPV markets are very slow to grow due to inherent risk-aversion in considering new building materials, and it…
Eloquent Executives Ecosystem Expositions
#cmc,#confab,#namedropping With dimensional scaling reaching economic limits, each company in the IC fab industry must rely upon trusted connections with customers and suppliers to know which way to go, and the only way to gain trusted connections is through attending live events. Fortunately, whether you are an executive, and engineer, or an investor, there is at least one must-attend event happening these days to keep you informed. We should always…
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