TSMC commits to two tools for delivery next year Maybe, just maybe, ASML Holding N.V. (ASML) has made the near-impossible a reality by creating a cost-effective Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV @ ~13.5nm wavelength) all-reflective lithographic tool. The company has announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSMC) has ordered two NXE:3350B EUV systems for delivery in 2015 with the intention to use those systems in production. In addition, two NXE:3300B systems…
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Semiconductor Materials: Growth, Opportunities and Challenges
Don’t miss this week’s webcast on Thursday at 1:00 pm Eastern, 10:00am Pacific. We have two great speakers lined up. First, Lita Shon‐Roy, President/CEO of Techcet, will provide an overview of chip level materials markets, focusing on growth and opportunities. Next, SRC’s Jon Candelaria, Director, GRC Interconnect and Packaging Sciences, will describe how today’s researchers are exploring materials challenges beyond Moore’s Law. Click here to register. Here are some more…
Don’t Hack My Light Bulb, Bro
The age of the Internet of Things is upon us. It’s about all anyone talked about over the last few weeks, as I visited the TSMC Open Innovation Platform (Sept 29th), ARM TechCon (October 1-2) and Semicon Europa (Oct 7-9). I think Rick Cassidy, Senior VP of TSMC and president of TSMC North America, captured most people’s feelings when he kicked off the TSMC OIP saying: “The IoT is hot,…
Pittsburgh IMAPS Workshop
By Karen Lightman, Executive Director, MEMS Industry Group Packaging means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Webster’s dictionary defines package as a “group or a number of things, boxed and offered as a unit.” For my school-age daughters, packaging means figuring out how to maximize the components of their lunch into these bento-box-like containers I bought at Target in hopes that it would simplify their…
Nakamura Co-Wins Nobel for Blue LEDs
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano, and Shuji Nakamura “for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”. In the late 1980s red and green LEDs had been around for decades, but despite large programs in both academia and industry there had been almost no R&D progress in blue LEDs (this editor did process…
IBM Shows Graphene as Epi Template
Last month in Nature Communications (doi:10.1038/ncomms5836) IBM researchers Jeehwan Kim, et al. published “Principle of direct van der Waals epitaxy of single-crystalline films on epitaxial graphene.” They show the ability to grow sheets of graphene on the surface of 100mm-diameter SiC wafers, the further abilitity to grow epitaxial single-crystalline films such as 2.5-μm-thick GaN on the graphene, the even greater ability to then transfer the grown GaN film to any…
Sensory Shanghai
By Stephen Whalley, Chief Strategy Officer, MEMS Industry Group It was over 10 years ago that I last visited Shanghai and oh my, how things have changed, most visibly, the skyline. Looking across the Huangpu River from The Bund back then, I clearly remember the ‘Pearl’ TV tower and a few tall buildings and thought how impressive it looked. Now, the view is an even more sumptuous feast for the…
Leti integrates everything
Now I know how wafers feel when moving through a fab. Leti in Grenoble, France does so much technology integration that in 2010 it opened a custom-developed people-mover to integrate cleanrooms (“Salles Blanches” in French) it calls a Liaison Blanc-Blanc (LBB) so workers can remain in bunny-suits while moving batches of wafers between buildings. I got to ride the LBB from the 300mm diameter wafer silicon CMOS and 200mm diameter…
Internet-of-Things Infographic
The global IoT market is poised for explosive growth. By 2020, the market is expected to soar to $7.1 trillion. This infographic, courtesy of Jabil, gives an good overview of what will be connected (even garbage bins!).
The Second Shoe Drops – Now We Have the Samsung V-NAND Flash
By Dick James, Senior Technology Analyst, Chipworks Two weeks ago, we posted about the TSMC 20nm product that we had in-house; now after waiting for a year since Samsung’s announcement of V-NAND production, we have that in the lab and can start to see what it looks like. The vertical flash was first released in an enterprise solid-state drive (SSD) last year, in 960 GB and 480 GB versions, but with no model…
