Good Filters, Poor Resists


Shrinking feature sizes and more complex lithography schemes are increasing the pressure on all aspects of the lithography process, including resists and resist filtration. As Clint Haris, vice president and general manager for liquid micro contamination control at Entegris explained, fabs are pushing resist manufacturers toward more stringent control of both contaminants and “soft particl... » read more

The Trouble With MEMS


The advent of the Internet of Things will open up a slew of new opportunities for MEMS-based sensors, but chipmakers are proceeding cautiously. There are a number of reasons for that restraint. Microelectromechanical systems are difficult to design, manufacture and test, which initially fueled optimism in the MEMS ecosystem that this market would command the same kinds of premiums that analo... » read more

How To Make 3D NAND


In 2013, Samsung reached a major milestone in the IC industry by shipping the world’s first 3D NAND device. Now, after some delays and uncertainty, Intel, Micron, SK Hynix and the SanDisk/Toshiba duo are finally ramping up or sampling 3D NAND. 3D NAND is the long-awaited successor to today’s planar or 2D NAND, which is used in memory cards, solid-state storage drives (SSDs), USB flash dr... » read more

One-On-One: Dave Hemker


Dave Hemker, CTO at [getentity id="22820" comment="Lam Research"], sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to look at some of the key issues on the process and manufacturing side, and some of the key developments that will reshape the semiconductor industry in the future. What follows are excerpts of that conversation. SE: One of the big discussion topics these days is [getkc id="208" commen... » read more

Many Paths To Hafnium Oxide


Equipment and materials suppliers often talk about the fragmentation of integrated circuit processing. While the number of manufacturers has gone down, the diversity of the underlying semiconductor market has increased. Low-power processors for mobile devices, non-volatile memory for solid state disks, and dedicated graphics processors all have different requirements from the traditional ind... » read more

What’s Next In Mobile Displays


The next wave of smartphones and wearables is invading the market. These systems will feature a new class of high-resolution displays, and in the near future displays will become foldable and rollable, although there are still some challenges with this technology. To be sure, mobile display technology is advancing on several fronts. On one front, for example, Apple and other systems vendor... » read more

Wanted: Integrated Approach To Hardware Design


By Tarun Amla Today’s electronic products have become so sophisticated and ubiquitous that we have come to expect that each new generation will address both our current and future needs. Years ago, the industry was hardware-centric and driven by “big iron” products. Capacity and functionality were thoroughly dependent upon increasingly complex hardware. Think of the movies of the 1950s w... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: June 10


Self-Assembling Nano Films Applying thin films with uniformity has always been an engineering challenge, but as feature sizes shrink the problem become even more pronounced. But a new approach developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs’ Materials Science Division could end up simplifying this process. The new approach used chloroform as an annealing solvent to create self-assembling arr... » read more

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