More Silicon Wafer Consolidation


The silicon wafer business typically flies under the radar, but it’s a fundamental part of the semiconductor business. Every chipmaker needs to buy silicon wafers in one size or another. In the supply chain, silicon wafer vendors produce and sell bare or raw silicon wafers to chipmakers, who in turn process them into chips. So it’s important to keep an eye on the market. Today, the s... » read more

Inspecting Unpatterned Wafers


Unpatterned wafer inspection, which has flown well under the radar for most of the semiconductor industry, is becoming more critical amid the need to find defects earlier in the manufacturing process flow. Finding those defects is getting harder as critical dimensions shrink. It's more difficult to actually detect smaller defects on bare wafers, there is more data to process, and there is mo... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Aug. 27


Growing tubes Single-wall carbon nanotubes could one day be used in electronics, optoelectronics, biomedical imaging and other applications. But the synthesis of nanotubes with defined chiralities has been a stumbling block. A chiral molecule is a molecule that has a non-superposable mirror image. The University of Southern California has shown that chirality-pure short nanotubes can be use... » read more