Belgian research institute imec shows the opportunities for imagers when teams of designers, software engineers, technologists, and system designers collaborate. Els Parton, Piet De Moor, Jonathan Borremans, and Andy Lambrechts, imec, Leuven, Belgium

An economically viable method for delivering throughput in fab equipment. Thomas Uhrmann, EV Group, St. Florian, Austria, and Ralph Delmdahl, Coherent GmbH, Göttingen, Germany

If an LED manufacturer wants to improve yield or reliability, it's important to know the source of the problem. Rebecca Howland and Tom Pierson, KLA-Tencor, Milpitas, CA.

Analysts see renewed vigor for chip sales. Christian Gregor Dieseldorff, SEMI; Bill McClean, IC Insights; Adrienne Downey, Semico Research; Mark Thirsk, Linx Consulting; Jean-Christophe Eloy, Yole Développement; and Ron Leckie, Infrastructure Advisors.

We asked leading industry experts to give us their perspectives on what we can expect in 2013. The challenges ahead include 450mm, FinFETs and 3D NAND, TSVs and 3D integration, and sensor fusion.

One of the highlights of SEMI's Industry Strategy Symposium — held in January in Half Moon Bay, California — was the first public presentation of a fully patterned 450mm silicon wafer.

A major challenge facing the industry in the coming year is how to deliver products faster without affecting budgets or compromising safety and quality.

Excitement is building in the world of printed and flexible electronics. Recent announcements of flexible and curved displays for mobile phones, TVs and other consumer devices will push technologists to solve scale-up challenges in manufacturing, helping migrate products from prototypes to mass production.

RADAR works by reflecting RF waves off of a target, which return to the RADAR system to be processed. The amount of time it takes to return correlates to the object's distance.

In its annual study, KPMG found three quarters of semiconductor executives polled believe they will see revenue growth in the next fiscal year — that's up from 63% in the previous survey.

The semiconductor industry is undergoing massive transformation as the rise in mobile computing, changes to the fabless-foundry model, uncertainties in technical innovation, and global macroeconomic trends become the dominant forces in 2013 and beyond, according to industry leaders speaking at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS).

GlobalFoundries says it plans to build a $2 billion R&D facility at its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, NY.

IC Insights says fabless IC suppliers saw sales rise 6% in 2012, compared with a -4% decline by IDMs (those with their own IC fabs), and the overall market's -2% decline for the year.

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced that $194 million will be dedicated during the next five years to six new university microelectronics research centers to support the continued growth and leadership of the U.S. semiconductor industry.

Singapore's Institute of Microelectronics (IME), a research institute of the Science and Engineering Research Council of the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), has launched a new multiproject wafer service (MPW) for 2.5D through-silicon interposers, to provide a cost-effective platform for R&D prototyping and proof-of-concept in the technology.

STMicroelectronics is getting out of the JV chip business with Ericsson, but it's still full-steam ahead for its use of fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technology with its partners.

Over the past 24 months, construction timelines for new wafer production facilities have contracted so much that construction firms are now required to move from bid package to on-site prep in as little as three weeks.