New processes and materials pose many challenges for supporting vacuum equipment. Intelligent design choices can address these challenges.
Apple Fab Speculation
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…
Silex’ Strategic Acquisition by China
A secretive investment holding company out of Hong Kong named GAE Ltd has acquired 98% of the shares in Silex Microsystems AB (Jarfalla, Sweden). The transaction took place on July 13th of this year when the former major shareholders agreed…
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…
Chasing IC Yield when Every Atom Counts
Increasing fab costs coming for inspection and metrology At SEMICON West this year in Thursday morning’s Yield Breakfast sponsored by Entegris, top executives from Qualcomm, GlobalFoundries, and Applied Materials discussed the challenges to achieving profitable fab yield for atomic-scale devices…
