Today, Intel sponsored a history of the planar IC event at the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California. This, in the same week that the company pre-launches a new advertising campaign to try to position the company as “Sponsors of Tomorrow.” Based on the live event, the past was seriously wonderful. Based on these […]
Human intellectual development has eclipsed emotional development, with the resulting problem of clever people lacking morals. In government, industry, and academia there are endless examples of this problem, which is now threatening the economy due to corruption, and the very biosphere of the earth due to pollution. It is heartening that MIT (that trained most […]
Silicon Valley has certainly not been immune to the current economic conditions, with many companies announcing multiple rounds of layoffs and moving operations overseas. Yet for many it is still considered “the heart” of the high-tech industry. At today’s well-attended Silicon Valley Lunch Forum, organized by the Sales and Marketing Council of SEMI, three speakers […]
The Materials Research Society (MRS) Spring Meeting in San Francisco is so huge, this year attracting a record of over 5,000 attendees, that strategy is needed to try to see any representative sample of the event. To provide in-depth information about new materials technologies, new symposia have been added over the years such that there […]
Intermolecular, the combinatorial R&D company that has been working on semiconductor fab processes, plans to grow solar R&D to possibly be the largest portion of the company’s business. Under the leadership of new vice president and general manager of solar business group Craig Hunter (who joined from Applied Materials), Intermolecular is now working on both […]
IMEC has begun expanding its beautiful Leuven, Belgium campus facilities, starting with 2,800 square-meters of research labs and including the extension of its state-of-the-art clean room. With this extension, IMEC will expand its research on 22nm CMOS and beyond, low-cost and high-efficiency solar cells, and biomedical electronics. The Flemish Government invests 35 million euro and […]
Materials research and engineering continues to increase in structural complexity. Starting from the periodic table of the elements and molecular engineering, over a century of research has explored most obvious phenomena of bulk and thin-film materials. What, then, is left to explore? The vast complexity of natural micro- and nano-scale structures that are indirectly templated […]
Trust is the foundation of all trade and business. Without trust, no deal can get done, no venture can be launched, no discussion can even begin. Trust has been shaken in individual businesses in recent years, but recently exposed financial scams have shaken confidence not just in one or a collection of companies but almost […]
JEOL will install the first e-beam direct-write-on-wafer (EBDW) lithography tool to support nanotechnology development in the Pacific Northwest when the University of Washington takes delivery of a JBX-6300FS tool. The system will be installed in the state-funded Washington Technology Center Microfabrication Lab. Funding for the tool acquisition was provided through a state-supported STAR researchers’ grant […]
Metrosol has joined SEMATECH’s Front End Process Technologies Program at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) of the University at Albany to address metrology and data-analysis solutions for 45nm node and beyond IC fabs. The joint partnership will expand on current work to develop inline metrology techniques to monitor the thickness and composition […]