Manufacturing Bits: April 26


Multi-beam inspection For some time, Singaporean startup Maglen has been developing a multi-beam e-beam inspection tool technology. Now, Maglen has reached two milestones. First, it has devised a full column test stand. The test stand includes a mechanical column and software. The second milestone is also significant. “We also dropped our beam and obtained our very first images,” sai... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: April 5


Food in 3D Using a technology called ptychographic X-ray computed tomography, the University of Copenhagen and the Paul Scherrer Institute have taken images of food in three dimensions and on a nanometer scale. Ptychography, a lensless coherent imaging technique, could potentially save the food industry money. It could reduce food waste due to faulty production methods. Ptychography could ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 29


Photonic-phononic circuit Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed a piezo-optomechanical circuit that converts signals among optical, acoustic and radio waves. At the heart of the piezoelectric optomechanical circuit is an optomechanical cavity, which consists of a suspended nanoscale beam. Within the beam are a series of holes that act like a ha... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: March 22


Superconducting memory A group of scientists from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Moscow State University developed a fundamentally new type of memory cell based on superconductors, which they believe will be able to work hundreds of times faster than memory devices commonly used today. The basic memory cells are based on quantum effects in "sandwiches" of supercond... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: March 8


5G mmWave consortium Amid a slowdown in the cell phone business, the market is heating up for perhaps the next big thing in wireless—5th generation mobile networks or 5G. Carriers, chipmakers and telecom equipment vendors are all rushing to get a piece of the action in 5G, which is the follow-on to the current wireless standard known as 4G or long-term evolution (LTE). Radio-frequency (RF... » read more

When Cryptographers Disagree


Six of the world's leading cryptography experts sat down this week to explore the most pressing issues in security. They took up topics ranging from whether Apple should facilitate the FBI's access to a known terrorist's iPhone, to what will become the next important cryptography algorithm. Among them: Ronald Rivest, an Institute Professor at MIT; Adi Shamir, co-inventor of the RSA algorithm... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Feb. 2


Do-it-yourself optoelectronics The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has developed a technology to make optical components on a do-it-yourself basis. To make a component, researchers have devised what they call plasmon-assisted etching. The process makes use of a nanostructured template, which can be used to create optical components. The template is a 2D array of gold pillar-su... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Jan. 5


New materials for 3D printing HRL Laboratories has developed a new ceramic technology for 3D printing. The technology overcomes the limits of traditional ceramic processing, thereby enabling high-strength components. Ceramics are much more difficult to process than traditional 3D printing materials, such as polymers or metals, according to HRL, a corporate R&D laboratory owned by The Boeing... » read more

Inside The SRC


Semiconductor Engineering sat down to talk with Ken Hansen, the new president and chief executive of the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC), a U.S.-based technology research consortium. Prior to joining the SRC in May, Hansen was vice president and chief technology officer at Freescale. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: My impression is that the SRC allocates funding for va... » read more

Measuring FinFETs Will Get Harder


The industry is gradually migrating toward chips based on finFET transistors at 16nm/14nm and beyond, but manufacturing those finFETs is proving to be a daunting challenge in the fab. Patterning is the most difficult process for finFETs. But another process, metrology, is fast becoming one of the biggest challenges for the next-generation transistor technology. In fact, [getkc id="252" kc_n... » read more

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