The Collaborative Alliance for Semiconductor Test (CAST) will join SEMI as a special interest group to better manage and accelerate industry progress on critical test issues. CAST expects to gain administrative efficiencies, global resources, SEMI International Standards support, and greater recognition for the CAST agenda. CAST will transfer its governance structure and agenda to SEMI […]

Veeco has exited betas with a new Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) named Dimension® Icon™ that provides small-sample resolution for large-samples. Building upon the successful Dimension AFM platform, the latest member of the product line delivers the highest resolution, best ease-of-use, and fastest time-to-results of any large-sample AFM on the market today. “With the Icon AFM, […]

After the 1st “act” of the story of Intel as a memory chip company founded in 1969, the 2nd act really started in 1985 with the decision to bet the company on the 80386 microprocessor according to Richard S. Tedlow, Harvard Business School professor and residential scholar of the Computer History Museum, in a lecture […]

Just over five years ago, I was one of the steering committee members of the MIT • Stanford • UC Berkeley Nanotechnology Forum, and had the pleasure of meeting new U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu when he was one of the presenters at our first event, “Nanotech beyond the hype,” held May 29, 2003 at […]

At SEMI’s SMC yesterday, Sung Wook Park, executive vice president and general manager of Hynix Semiconductor, provided a keynote address on the materials needs for mainstream memory chips over the next decade. DRAMs will likely turn into STTRAMs, and NAND Flash will probably be replaced by ReRAM (Ref: Ed’s Threads 080505). Combinatorial materials R&D company […]

As SEMI’s SMC today, Raymond Roberge, SVP and CTO of Praxair Electronics, proposed a pragmatic new collaboration model for electronic materials R&D. Semiconductor fab process materials TAM for 2008 was ~$10B, yet materials suppliers now question their ongoing profitability. “Certainly the 300mm shift has resulted in productivity advances for IDMs at the expense of materials […]

At SEMI’s Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) running at Half Moon Bay, California today, IMEC president and CEO Gilbert Declerck talked about the need for R&D to facilitate IC industry growth. An industry based on answering the question, “what have you done for me lately?” can never rest on past successes and must continue to innovate. […]