Photomask Japan 2025: A Strong Signal For The Future Of Our Industry


Photomask Japan (PMJ) 2025 was, without a doubt, the most exciting edition I’ve attended in recent years. From a surge in attendance to a packed agenda full of technical depth and forward-looking insights, this year’s event reflected the growing momentum and innovation across the photomask and eBeam ecosystem. Let’s start with the numbers—624 attendees. That’s a significant jump fr... » read more

Precision Patterning Options Emerge For Advanced Packaging


The chip industry is ratcheting up investments in advanced packaging as it strives to keep pace with demands for increased functionality and higher performance, including novel patterning technologies that can reduce costs and speed time to market. Success in advanced packages is partly dependent on effectively managing the interconnectivity between the chips, which requires increasingly pre... » read more

Chip Industry Week In Review


The Design Automation Conference morphed into the Chips to Systems Conference, reflecting an industry shift from monolithic SoCs to assemblies of chiplets in various flavors of advanced packaging. The change drew a slew of students and a resurgent buzz, fueled by discussions about heterogeneous integration, reliability, and ways to leverage AI/ML to speed up design and verification processes. ... » read more

Accelerating Innovation With An E-Beam Lithography System


By Al Blais and Johnny Yeap Traditional lithography remains a standard in the industry, providing precision and a relatively cost-effective way to create patterns on the wafer when producing very high volumes of chips. However, cycle times can be long depending on the complexity of the masks that must be made. The emergence of maskless e-beam lithography is providing a complementary path ... » read more