Fabless companies are growing and evolving, driven by the need for a wider array of high performance, low power products in tablets, smartphones, and ultrabooks. Foundries are racing to meet their needs. Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief

A likely cause of many of the defects seen on EUV mask blanks is the ion beam missing the target of the mask blank deposition system. This analysis provides a possible solution. Patrick Kearney and Frank Goodwin, SEMATECH, Albany, NY

To resolve "stiction" yield failure issue in the manufacturing of MEMS devices, special release processes have been developed based on a combination of structural and sacrificial materials. Yin Xu, Vlad Tarasov, Wei Chen, And Koukou Suu, ULVAC Technologies, Inc., Methuen, MA

A number of techniques have been developed to control mask write time by reducing shot count. This article describes  and compares several techniques, and merits versus cost of each. Steffen Schulze and Tim Lin, Mentor Graphics, Wilsonville, OR

The lithography challenges  associated with TSV fabrication for various devices structures are investigated. Warren W. Flack, Manish Ranjan, Gareth Kenyon, Robert Hsieh, Ultratech, Inc., San Jose, CA. John Slabbekoorn, Andy Miller, imec, Leuven, Belgium

I recently had the good fortune to moderate the SEMI Northeast Forum on 450mm in Albany.

Micron has joined with Samsung to create the "Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) Consortium" with fellow founding members Altera, Open Silicon, and Xilinx. IBM will be manufacturing the the logic layer.

SensorsCon 2012 was held March 21 at the Santa Clara TechMart Center, in conjunction with the annual meeting of the International Society for Quality Electronic Design (ISQED).

This page is usually reserved for a guest editorial by someone in the industry that wants to rant a little bit about the lack of standards in any given area, the need to get young students interested in engineering and the sciences, why fab safety is so important, or answering the call to innovate, to give a few examples.

Demand is sharply increasing for projected capacitive (PROCAP) touchscreen display panels, used in smartphones and tablets, but capacitive touch panel structures are unique to each company.

The phosphor market is largely a game of scale and relationships, as much of the intellectual property (IP) around phosphors was created in the 1970-80s (at least for select element combinations) and protection has by now expired, analysts from Barclays Capital.

The MEMS packaging sector is growing 2x faster (~20% CAGR) by unit shipments than the larger IC packaging industry, shows Yole Développement in its report "MEMS Packaging."

Flow processor developer Netronome extended its strategic relationship with Intel Corp., manufacturing its next-generation Netronome flow processors (NFP) using Intel's 22nm tri-gate transistor architecture.

Optical display film revenues are declining in 2012, after a compound annual growth rate of 19% from 2009 to 2011, according to NPD DisplaySearch Q1'12 Quarterly Display Optical Film Report.

Active matrix organic light-emitting diodes (AMOLEDs) are moving from small-quantity development into higher volumes, with shipments destined for smartphones driving growth in the small- and medium-sized display (SMD) market in February, said IHS. SMDs are displays smaller than 10" diagonally.