Fab Investments Head Toward Record High


Corporations and governments around the globe are making record-breaking investments in chip manufacturing plants amid a major push to make the semiconductor supply chain more robust and less prone to shortages caused by everything from market variations to geopolitical interruptions. These investments — which range from updating existing fabrication facilities to building entirely new fab... » read more

Hybrid Bonding Moves Into The Fast Lane


The industry’s unquenchable thirst for I/O density and faster connections between chips, particularly logic and cache memory, is transforming system designs to include 3D architectures, and hybrid bonding has become an essential component in that equation. Hybrid bonding involves die-to-wafer or wafer-to-wafer connection of copper pads that carry power and signals and the surrounding diele... » read more

Suppressing Stochastic Interaction To Improve EUV Lithography


Authors Zhimin Zhu Sr., Joyce Lowes, Shawn Ye, Zhiqiang Fan, and Tim Limmer of Brewer Science, Inc. (United States) used Stochastic Area Thickness (SAT) and Dynamic Stochastic Area Thickness (DSAT) to evaluate the stochastic interactions. High optical foot exposure is proposed instead of conventional low substrate reflectivity to reduce SAT. Adhesion control by acid/quencher loading is proposed... » read more

5 Tips To Successfully Work Hybrid


Brewer Science is a global company that has international offices and remote employees since I was first hired in 1993. When the pandemic started in 2020, the company easily adapted to a remote/work-from-home structure. We have a company culture that thrives on change, in part due to the innovating and pioneering mindset the company was founded on. These cultural and business practices, combine... » read more

Variation Making Trouble In Advanced Packages


Variation is becoming increasingly problematic as chip designs become more heterogeneous and targeted by application, making it difficult to identify the root cause of problems or predict what can go wrong and when. Concerns about variation traditionally have been confined to the most advanced nodes, where transistor density is highest and where manufacturing processes are still being fine-t... » read more

Small Molecule Analysis Testing: Liquid Chromatography Versus Gas Chromatography


Chromatography is a process for separating components of a mixture for analysis. This is a component of our small molecule analysis testing and plays a critical part in identifying and quantifying impurities. It is also crucial in screening raw materials for identification, to ensure the quality and safety of products, as well as evaluate reactions by looking at residual analytes to better unde... » read more

High-Temperature Stable Spin-On Carbon Materials For Advanced Pattern Transfer Applications


In recent years a strong demand has arisen for spin-on carbon (SOC) materials compatible with high-temperature processes. This requirement is to enable usage of high-temperature SOC (HTSOC) materials in integration schemes utilizing chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and/or atomic layer deposition (ALD) processes. In addition to compatibility with the high-temperature deposition processes, planari... » read more

Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test


GlobalFoundries launched GF Labs, an “open framework of internal and external research and development initiatives that deliver a differentiated pipeline of market-driven process technology solutions for future data-centric, connected, intelligent and secure applications.” Greg Bartlett, GF's senior vice president of technology, engineering at quality, said the goal is to develop and exp... » read more

Reducing Greenhouse Gases In Manufacturing


Businesses must reduce their environmental impact. One of the most significant ways to do this is by reducing their carbon footprint, and this starts with monitoring carbon emissions. Carbon emissions are responsible for 81% of overall greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and businesses are responsible for a lot of it. The rest of the GHG emissions are methane (10%), nitrous oxide (7%) and fluorin... » read more

Study Of Bondable Laser Release Material Using 355nm Energy To Facilitate RDL-First And Die-First Fan-Out Wafer-Level Packaging (FOWLP)


A thorough evaluation on selecting a bondable laser release material for redistribution layer (RDL)-first and die-first fan-out wafer-level packaging (FOWLP) is presented in this article. Four laser release materials were identified based on their absorption coefficient at 355 nm. In addition, all four of these materials possess thermal stability above 350 °C and pull-off adhesion on a Ti/Cu l... » read more

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