Apple Corp. recent purchased an old 200mm-diameter silicon wafer fab in San Jose capable of creating as small as 90nm device features. Formerly owned and operated by Maxim, the US$18.2M purchase reportedly includes nearly 200 working fab tools. Some people…
MPU Cores and Legal Boors
As reported by The Register, AMD has been sued by a customer who claims that the number of Bulldozer cores in some Opteron and FX microprocessor (MPU) chips are fewer than advertised. The claim is based on the argument that…
Thermoplastically Deformable Electronic Circuits
Philips is testing a technology developed by imec and CMST (imec’s associated lab at Ghent University) to create low-cost 3D LED packages. As shown at last month’s International Microelectronics Assembly and Packaging Society (IMAPS 2015) meeting, these thermoplastically deformable electronic…
300mm ams Fab Bet on IoT
Leading-edge IC fab investments are multi-billion-dollar risky bets. Insufficient demand for ICs dooms the line to economic failure regardless of the quality of design and manufacturing. Thus, it is a big deal that Austrian-headquartered ams AG—world leader in production of…
Cross-point ReRAM Integration Claimed by Intel/Micron
The Intel/Micron joint-venture now claims to have successfully integrated a Resistive-RAM (ReRAM) made with an unannounced material in a cross-point architecture, switching using an undisclosed mechanism. Pilot production wafers are supposed to be moving through the Lehi fab, and samples…
Single-electron Molecular Switch 4nm Across
A molecule rotating on the surface of a crystal can function as a tunnel-gate of a transistor, as shown by researchers from the Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) and the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB), Germany, the NTT Basic Research Laboratories (NTT-BRL),…
Electronic Materials Specifications and Markets
At SEMICON West this year, July 14-16 in San Francisco, the Chemical and Gas Manufacturers Group (CGMG) Committee of SEMI have organized an excellent program covering “Contamination Control in the Sub-20nm Era” to occur in the afternoon of the 14th…
ALD of Crystalline High-K SHTO on Ge
Alternative channel materials (ACM) such as germanium (Ge) will need to be integrated into future CMOS ICs, and one part of the integration was shown at the recent Materials Research Society (MRS) spring meeting by John Ekerdt, Associate Dean for…
Bottoms-up ELD of Cobalt Plugs
As reported in more detail at Solid State Technology, during the IEEE IITC now happening in Grenoble, imec and Lam showed a new Electroless Deposition (ELD) cobalt (Co) process that is claimed to provide void-free bottoms-up pre-filling of vias and…
