Semiconductors In Automotive


It was more than 130 years ago in 1885 when Gottlieb Daimler invented the first prototype for the modern gas engine, and in 1886 Karl Benz patented his three-wheel Benz Motor Car, Model No. 1. Yet even these visionaries might have been surprised by the sophisticated technology running our cars today – and they couldn’t even have imagined the vast range of semiconductor components involved. ... » read more

Spectral Tunability For Accuracy, Robustness And Resilience


In overlay (OVL) metrology the quality of measurements and the resulting reported values depend heavily on the measurement setup used. For example, in scatterometry OVL (SCOL) metrology a specific target may be measured with multiple illumination setups, including several apodization options, two possible laser polarizations, and multiple possible laser wavelengths. Not all possible setups a... » read more

Growth Ahead For Vacuum Subsystems


Vacuum pumps, pressure gauges and vacuum valves combined make up the biggest expense on the bill of materials for semiconductor OEMs. In 2017, almost $2.5 billion worth of vacuum subsystems were consumed by the semiconductor industry with over half supplied by vendors based in Europe. Vacuum subsystems sales account for one third of expenditure on all critical subsystems used in semiconducto... » read more

Big Shifts In Tech Conferences


By Ed Sperling and Katherine Derbyshire Identifying central themes in technology conferences, or finding enough latitude where the theme is extremely well defined, is becoming challenging throughout the tech industry. Throughout the semiconductor industry, in particular, many are asking how various organizations will differentiate conferences in the future and who will be the target audience... » read more

Adapt Or Fall Behind: Surviving And Thriving In The Competitive Jungle Of Plant Operations Scheduling And IIoT


Biopharmaceutical manufacturing has required significant technological developments in the area of cell culture, chromatography, and purification. It is no small miracle that every day across the world, millions of liters of cell culture capacity generates life-saving medicines for the patients who need it. The bio-manufacturing process is unique in its need for— Tight regulation of an i... » read more

The Materials Side Of AI


As we enter the foundry 7nm and below technology nodes, tungsten fill for contacts has reached the physical limits of scaling and copper used in the lowest level interconnects is facing challenges on multiple fronts. Solving these issues will require a new conducting material, namely cobalt. This transition can enable continued device scaling and less power consumption per computation. Follo... » read more

Where FD-SOI Works Best (Part 2)


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss changes in the FD-SOI world and what's behind them, with James Lamb, deputy CTO for advanced semiconductor manufacturing and corporate technical fellow at Brewer Science; Giorgio Cesana, director of technical marketing at STMicroelectronics; Olivier Vatel, senior vice president and CTO at Screen Semiconductor Solutions; and Carlos Mazure, CTO at Soi... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 14


Strange metals The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (National MagLab) has unraveled the behavior in a new class of high-temperature superconductor (HTS) materials called cuprates. Cuprates are sometimes referred as a "strange" or "bad" metal. They don't conduct electricity well despite being a superconducting material. Superconductors are devices that have zero electrical resistance,... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


Trade wars The Trump administration unveiled a plan to impose additional tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods on July 10. The announced product list included more than ten categories of LED package and lighting products, according to LEDinside, a division of TrendForce. The export value of the major lighting products in the list reached $5 billion in 2017. “So far, the impact of the U... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 7


DNA ROMs The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC) are investing $12 million to develop a new class of memories and other technologies, such as DNA-based read-only memory (ROM), nucleic acid memory (NAM) and neural networks based on yeast cells. The effort is called the Semiconductor Synthetic Biology for Information Processing and Storage Technologies... » read more

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