Semiconductor & MEMS Fabrication News

AMD has entered a different kind of competition. Although most attention focuses on its market share compared with behemoth Intel, by spinning off its manufacturing operations last year to Global Foundries, AMD has entered the universe of "fabless" manufacturers. And, while Qualcomm has headed up this list for a number of years, AMD entered for the first time in 2009 at number 2 with a bullet. Altogether, the top 10 companies comprised 63% of the overall total. Nine of the top 10 fabless standouts are headquartered in the U.S. Only Taiwanese company MediaTek broke in at number 5, one notch above its position the previous year. Are you watching the race?

AAT has developed the world's first combination cleaner and cleanliness tester for circuit assemblies. The MegaION is a portable closed loop single board cleaner with R.O.S.E cleanliness verification testing built-in. Other cleaners simply check the rinse water, the MegaION completes the cleaning operation with an industry standard "ROSE" test.

We'll manufacture it exactly to your specifications from forgings, flash buttwelded rings, or bar stock. You can choose from a wide variety of alloys, including high nickel content options like inconel, maraging, and numonics. And we'll plate the Labyrinth Seal with anything you want.

Park Systems introduces the XE-3DM™, a fully automated 3D-AFM system designed for process monitoring and characterization of critical dimensions.

Using an ultra-sharp tip, the XE-3DM creates a high-resolution reconstruction of challenging structures like the narrow photoresist line shown here without the preparation time and damage created by a dual beam FIB-SEM.

This system provides an automated platform for high-resolution part inspection. Components are manually loaded into custom-built nests installed on Primatics .02 micron X-Y table stacks. Viewing custom screens and navigating via standard computer keyboard, the operator selects a recipe and then activates the cycle-start command. Learn more.

Ever-smaller device geometries place a tremendous burden on the computer systems that control the lithography process. According to this item from Solid State Technology's Electro IQ Web site, 22 nm wafers will require an absurd three orders of magnitude more computing power than were needed for 65 nm. Here, James Word and Xima Zhang from Mentor Graphics offer some practical solutions in an effort to remove the "im" from "impossible".

In designing new semiconductor devices, modeling the hardware logic in software can dramatically reduce time-to-market. Getting the model to mimic the hardware exactly, however, represents something of a challenge. But is such exactitude necessary? According to this piece from System Level Design, the existence of such models during device development proves much more important than the precise hardware/software match. They contend that honing a model beyond practical necessity garners only diminishing returns.

For years, engineers have insisted that maintaining the thrust of Moore's Law will require replacing silicon with a material that allows higher performance. Finding a worthy successor, however, has remained elusive. Now, a European research team has developed a process for growing graphene, a graphite derivative that has proved both stronger and more electrically conductive than either silicon or gallium arsenide.

Don't count silicon out just yet! At the recent Industry Strategy Symposium Europe held in Dublin, Ireland, Intel director of technology strategy Paolo Gargini recommended adding III-V compound layers on top of the silicon to improve performance and reduce power consumption. He contends that getting to 32 nm has required modifying existing manufacturing processes about as far as they can go. Smaller features will demand more fundamental process changes.

Sensonor Technologies is now launching their high precision gyro sensor calibrated and compensated with digital SPI interface, and with high reliability and robustness over lifetime. The sensor has low vibration sensitivity and high overload and shock capability.

Read more: SAR150.

The KXTF9's Directional Tap/Double-Tap™ detection feature recognizes singletap and double-tap input and reports the acceleration axis and direction from which each tap originated, enabling up to 12, user-defined function commands. Learn more.

The design cost associated with developing new chips continues to rise. One way to bring them down is to shorten the design cycle. This article advocates achieving that goal by adding verification steps earlier in the project to ensure that bugs don't survive to later stages. Earlier verification also encourages modularity in the design. Examining a smaller section of the circuit considerably reduces the complexity of the required simulation.

Most engineers associate the word "inspection" with visual and quasi-visual techniques like optical, infrared, and X-ray. But what about sound? This lesser-known approach offers advantages in certain situations. Sonoscan has found acoustic inspection particularly adept at distinguishing counterfeit device packages from their legitimate equivalents, increasingly important as the counterfeiters become more adept at making their versions look like the real deal.

The principal drawbacks to generating electricity from solar cells is that the sun goes down at night and energy from photovoltaics costs more than its conventional counterpart. Although unable to manage 24 hours a day of sunlight, IBM has found a way to bring costs down. Their new technique involves spin-coating nanoparticles onto a glass substrate, dramatically reducing dependence on expensive and rare elements such as indium and tellurium.

Unless you are directly involved with their production or applications, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) remain a mystery. What are they? How are they used? Why are they becoming so important in the design of tomorrow's products? This video produced by the MEMS Industry Group explores those issues from the ground up. Newcomers to MEMS technology will find it informative and thorough, and even experienced engineers may discover nuances with which they are unfamiliar.

Semi-Gas® Systems' Centurion gas panels, gas cabinets, and valve manifold boxes are engineered to deliver the safety, performance, and reliability required in Semiconductor production, R&D environments, and other critical applications. Our systems deliver the highest process purity for the safe handling and control of hazardous materials.

JST's single wafer spray tool has oscillating nozzles, adjustable speeds, and backside rinsing or isolation. Precision adjustment of the distance between nozzles and wafer surface and auto dispense with repeatable volume and mixing ensures precise etching. Capability for multiple size wafers is also available! Call JST!

Analog Devices' ADA4051 is a CMOS, micropower, zero-drift operational amplifier that utilizes an innovative chopping technique. This amplifier features rail-to-rail input/output swing and extremely low offset voltage while operating from a 1.8 V to 5.5 V power supply. Product announcement.

Integrated thin film resistor capacitor diode network termination products are built on silicon substrates from Universal Semiconductor, Inc. USI's thin film resistors, capacitors, and diodes are fabricated using proprietary, state-of-the-art thin film technology that offers high performance at very high frequencies.

Some people just don't end up in the careers they strive for. To compensate, they could attempt to counsel other people's possible career paths. As this video points out, their advice may prove suspect, and the road to success in any field is not always obvious. In pursuing some vocations, sometimes unconventional methods yield the best results. Have unconventional methods helped your career?

Speculations that life may have originated elsewhere other than Earth have received a boost. To the surprise of many scientists, a meteorite that fell some 40 years ago has yielded a plethora of organic compounds. Among the more than 14,000 such compounds uncovered so far, the rock contains 70 amino acids, the building blocks of life as we know it.

Shrinking Always Increases Costs

In a world where your customers expect prices to decline despite the increased costs associated with smaller device geometries, how will you keep your costs down? If you go fabless, how will your manufacturer keep costs down?