Broadening Scope of SEMICON

Once upon a time, SEMICONs were essentially just for semiconductor manufacturing business and technology, and predominantly CMOS ICs. Back when we followed public roadmaps for technology to maintain the cadence of new manufacturing nodes in support of Moore’s Law, it…

Leti Shows MEMS on 300mm Wafers

As reported by EETimes from the European MEMS Summit last month, French research institute CEA-Leti has manufactured accelerometer MEMS devices on 300mm-diameter wafers. This technology is currently being transferred to Tronics Microsystems SA (Grenoble, France), which currently only manufactures on…

IBM Shows Graphene as Epi Template

Last month in Nature Communications (doi:10.1038/ncomms5836) IBM researchers Jeehwan Kim, et al. published “Principle of direct van der Waals epitaxy of single-crystalline films on epitaxial graphene.” They show the ability to grow sheets of graphene on the surface of 100mm-diameter…

Leti integrates everything

Now I know how wafers feel when moving through a fab. Leti in Grenoble, France does so much technology integration that in 2010 it opened a custom-developed people-mover to integrate cleanrooms (“Salles Blanches” in French) it calls a Liaison Blanc-Blanc…