STMicroelectronics has become the first to install a CE-marked on-site fluorine (F2) generator at its 300mm fab in Crolles, France. The two systems, required for Chemical Vapour Deposition (CVD) chamber cleaning at the fab are a direct replacement for NF3. However, the Crolles site had previously used high pressure F2 cylinders, which needed to trucked and kept on-site. Linde Gases, a division of The Linde Group was responsible for the project, which now uses its ‘Generation-F’ technology.
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The SOI Industry Consortium announced that it is bolstering its academic and research sectors with three new, prestigious universities: Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley and Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan have all joined the consortium as academic members.
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Product Briefing Outline: Soitec has introduced a new generation of advanced substrates that support all the applications and architectures on the industry’s sub-45 nm roadmap. New solutions such as ultra-thin top silicon and ultra-thin Buried OXide (BOX) give device architects and designers complete flexibility in their choice of substrates for partially depleted (PD) and fully-depleted (FD) devices, including multi-gate transistor architectures (FinFET, Trigate).
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One of the equipment suppliers that consistently brings out new products is KLA-Tencor. However, the metrology supplier rarely figures in the most popular rankings in any given year. That has changed in 2008 with its TeraFab tool. Although only released recently, the fifth most popular product was from TEL and Novellus for copper interconnects.
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Product Briefing Outline: Rohm and Haas Electronic Materials have said that its novel defect reduction and slurry reduction groove designs for CMP pads have already been adopted in high volume manufacturing (HVM) by customers in Europe, Korea, North America and Taiwan. While currently being used on the Rohm and Haas IC1000 AT CMP pad for the 90nm process node and below, multiple customers are now also testing the defect reduction groove on the ‘VisionPad’ line of CMP pads.
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By Chuck Extrand, Entegris, Chaska, Minnesota, USA - ABSTRACT - Polymers, commonly referred to as plastics, are widely used in the manufacturing of microelectronic devices. In addition to their many desirable properties, such as low cost, light weight, strength, ductility and ease of processing, polymers can be created free of metals and inorganic constituents that may interfere with sensitive clean room fabrication processes in multiple ways. For example, the loose molecular structure of polymers may allow the unwanted permeation of gases and simple liquids in fabrication facilities. This paper will provide a brief introduction to factors that influence permeation through polymers, discussing polymer structure background and its relation to permeation, and the influences of various polymer properties on permeation.
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