The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Intel has submitted a business plan to upgrade its fab in Israel, according to reports. Crocus Nano Electronics (CNE), the joint venture founded in 2011 by Crocus Technology and Russia’s RUSNANO, has raised $60 million from its investors. The venture is Russia’s first 300mm fab. This first production line was completed one year after construction began. Currently, 200mm and 300mm CMOS wa... » read more

Blog Review: April 30


Applied Materials’ Jeremy Read points to a looming problem for the Internet of Things—legacy fabs that will require software upgrades and advanced process control. Also needed: Sensors attached to thousands of machines for predictive maintenance. Foundries are now ready for production finFETs. Cadence's Richard Goering captures the buzz at last week’s TSMC Tech Symposium, where the ro... » read more

Stopping Mask Hotspots Before They Escape The Mask Shop


By Aki Fujimura The same types of physics-based issues that have haunted lithography for decades have started to impact mask writing as well. The increasingly small and complex mask shapes specified by optical proximity correction (OPC) that are now required for faithful wafer lithography at 28nm-and-below nodes have given rise to an increase in mask hotspots. Mask hotspots occur when the shap... » read more

Mask Issues Ahead


It's not just the lithography that's getting complicated. Check out this video by Dai Nippon Printing's Naoya Hayashi. [youtube vid=a6WmvhTdEv4] » read more

Billions And Billions Invested


Over the years, next-generation [getkc id="80" kc_name="lithography"] (NGL) has suffered various setbacks and delays. But until recently, the industry basically shrugged its shoulders and expressed relatively little anxiety about the NGL delays. After all, optical lithography was doing the job in the fab and NGL would eventually materialize. Today, however, the mood is different. In fact, th... » read more

Mask Hotspots Are Escaping The Mask Shop


Although the overwhelming majority of wafer production issues at the 28nm-and- below process nodes are lithography- and OPC-related, the semiconductor industry is starting to see problems caused by mask hotspots: wafer-level production issues that are caused when the shapes specified by optical proximity correction (OPC) are not faithfully reproduced on the mask. Mask hotspots will account for ... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


A market research firm once said if you want to sell a lot of market studies, you have to report big numbers. And some competitors have done just that, according to Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. In fact, some research houses inflated their smartphone shipment numbers, saying that the figure reached 1 billion in 2013, Strauss said. So, did 1 billion smartphones really ship last ye... » read more

Directed Self-Assembly Gains Momentum


At last year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography symposium, directed self-assembly (DSA) grabbed the spotlight as chipmakers provided the first glimpse of their initial work and results with the technology. The results were stunning, thereby propelling DSA from a curiosity item to a possible patterning solution for next-generation devices. Last year, in fact, GlobalFoundries, IBM, Intel and Sams... » read more

One-on-One: Naoya Hayashi


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to discuss the current and future challenges in the photomask industry with Naoya Hayashi, research fellow at Dai Nippon Printing (DNP). SE: What are the big challenges for the photomask industry today? Hayashi: There are several challenges. Most of the challenges involve mask complexity. It is also quite difficult to handle the mask data, because it is ... » read more

Next-Generation Lithography


Aki Fujimura, CEO of D2S, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to talk about the challenges of moving to the next process nodes and how that will affect everything from lithography to the write time, size and cost of photomasks. [youtube vid=L96vi-BjhDU] » read more

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