News

Monday 3rd March 2003

International Conference on the Commercialization of Micro and Nanosystems (COMS), September 8-11, 2003, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Monday 3rd March 2003

Ashland Electronic Chemicals is to be the primary outsourcing manufacturer for ASMLs Thermal division under a multi-year contract. The agreement includes responsibility for sourcing and procurement of all materials, and assembly and testing of all toolsets. ASML Thermal offers large-batch and single-wafer thermal process furnaces and atmospheric pressure chemical vapour deposition (APCVD) systems.

Monday 3rd March 2003

The worldwide semiconductor market is forecast to grow 8.9% in 2003, with revenue totalling $167bn, up from $153.4bn in 2002, according to quarterly forecast estimates from Gartner Dataquest. The slowdown at the end of 2002 is continuing in Q1 2003.

Monday 3rd March 2003

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researchers have developed a method for growing conducting polymers called Surface Polymerisation of Ion-Assisted Deposition or SPIAD (Journal of the American Chemical Society, online since February 6 and in print March 5, 2003).

Monday 3rd March 2003

Test system producer Agilent Technologies has opened two new facilities on the Malaysian island of Penang.

Monday 3rd March 2003

National Semiconductor is seeking to sell its Information Appliance unit, consisting primarily of the Geode family of products, as well as its cellular baseband business.

Saturday 1st March 2003

Agere Systems was claiming it has 21 "breakthrough" transistor products aimed at the wireless power amplifier market for 2-3G base station equipment.

Friday 28th February 2003

Work on a unified European Union patent continues, according to an interview with the Greek R&D general secretary Demetrios Deniozos. Germany has proposed an initial stage of mobile judges and the establishment of specialised patent courts in member states to be used in a transitional period to a centralised court based in Luxembourg.

Thursday 27th February 2003

French president Jacques Chirac inaugurated the Crolles2 Alliance of Philips, Motorola and STMicroelectronics. The joint R&D centre will pioneer CMOS technology from 90nm processes to 32nm over the next five years and also includes a 300mm wafer semiconductor manufacturing pilot line, which is now beginning operation. Taiwan foundry TSMC also has participation in the work in terms of process development and alignment.

Thursday 27th February 2003

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Thursday 27th February 2003

Electron microscope and ion-beam system producer FEI opened a new 8600m2 site in Brno, Czech Republic. This new facility replaces a previous building in Brno and features extensive space for expanded production, research and development capabilities, and enhanced field service and support. FEI currently has 164 employees in the city.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

Researchers from Munich-based universities and from German chemical company Covion have developed a class of electroluminescent (EL) polymers that can be patterned in a way similar to standard lithography photoresists (Nature, February 20, 2003).

Wednesday 26th February 2003

Infineon Technologies and Saifun Semiconductors of Israel have set up Infineon Technologies Flash GmbH & Co. KG to develop Flash memory products. The joint venture has plans to integrate DRAM and Flash expertise.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

Micron Technology announced a series of cost-reduction initiatives including a 10% cut (approximately 1800 people) in its global workforce. The company says it wants to capitalise on the its aggressive migration to 0.11micron manufacturing process technology. The company will focus on products based on its latest generation process technology and will lower costs and expenses.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

SEMIs book-to-bill ratio for North American semiconductor equipment suppliers was 0.92 in January 2003 (preliminary). Three month average bookings were worth $742mn, 15% up on January 2002. Billings were $806mn, a nominal growth of 1% on January 2002. The final ratio for December 2002 was 0.94.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

VLSI Research released its top ten semiconductor equipment suppliers for 2002 based on revenues. US and Japanese companies dominated the listing with only one European company - lithography system producer ASML at No.3 with $1.875bn in revenues.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

The worldwide semiconductor market is forecast to grow 8.9% in 2003, with revenue totalling $167bn, up from $153.4bn in 2002, according to quarterly forecast estimates from Gartner Dataquest. The slowdown at the end of 2002 is continuing in Q1 2003.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

Intel plans to convert its 200mm Fab 12 to 300mm production. The facility is located in Arizona. Costs for the conversion project are estimated at $2bn.

Wednesday 26th February 2003

DRAM companies have been announcing chips and modules compliant with the double data rate 400Mbits/sec (DDR400) specification. Among the chip manufacturers with DDR400 products are Germanys Infineon Technologies, South Koreas Samsung and Hynix and Japans Elpida (former joint venture of NEC and Hitachi).

Monday 24th February 2003

Ashland Electronic Chemicals is to be the primary outsourcing manufacturer for ASMLs Thermal division under a multi-year contract. The agreement includes responsibility for sourcing and procurement of all materials, and assembly and testing of all toolsets. ASML Thermal offers large-batch and single-wafer thermal processing furnaces and atmospheric pressure chemical vapour deposition (APCVD) systems.

Monday 24th February 2003

Concrete results from the European Commissions nanotechnology projects from the Fifth Framework (FP5) programme have been put up on the Commissions Research and Development Information Service (CORDIS) website.

Friday 21st February 2003

Taiwans National Central University (NCU) has reported successful operation of electrically pumped violet laser diodes, developed on their Aixtron AIX 200/4 RF deposition system.

Friday 21st February 2003

What started as research into transistor reliability could lead to a new silicon chip based "nano-lamp". A scientist at Netherlands University of Twente, Phuong Le Minh, found that a controlled breakdown in semiconductor oxide layers of the transistor/antifuse structure of memory cells can emit light.

Friday 21st February 2003

Researchers have used the highly conductive surface layer induced in diamond by hydrogen termination to create in-plane gate transistors (Applied Physics Letters, February 10, 2003). Oxidised lines of 100nm blocked of leakage current down to 0.3pA/micron at 100V at room temperature.