San Francisco (USA) – July 2, 2013 – Imec has developed a Manganese (Mn)-based self-formed barrier (SFB) process that significantly improves Resistance Capacitance (RC) performance, via resistance and reliability in advanced interconnects. It provides excellent adhesion, film conformality, intrinsic barrier property and reduced line resistance. This technology paves the way towards interconnect Cu metallization into the 7nm node and beyond.

With continuous interconnect scaling, the wire resistance per unit length increases, which has a detrimental impact on the device performance (RC). Moreover, when reducing the dimensions with conventional barrier layers, an increased loss of copper (Cu) cross sectional area is … Read More → "Imec solves metallization issues in advanced interconnects for the sub-1X technology node"

CAMBRIDGE, Mass- Cloud computing — outsourcing computational tasks over the Internet — could give home-computer users unprecedented processing power and let small companies launch sophisticated Web services without building massive server farms.

But it also raises privacy concerns. A bank of cloud servers could be running applications for 1,000 customers at once; unbeknownst to the hosting service, one of those applications might have no purpose other than spying on the other 999.

Encryption could make cloud servers more secure. Only when the data is actually being processed would it be decrypted; the results of … Read More → "New hardware design protects data in the cloud"

ST. FLORIAN, Austria and INDIANAPOLIS, Ind., June 17, 2013-EV Group (EVG), a leading supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment, and Dynaloy, LLC, an international manufacturer of chemicals for the electronics industry and wholly owned subsidiary of Eastman Chemical Company, today introduced CoatsClean™-an innovative single-wafer photoresist and residue removal technology designed to address thick films and difficult-to-remove material layers for the 3D-ICs/through-silicon vias (TSVs), advanced packaging, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and compound semiconductor markets.  CoatsClean provides a complete wafer cleaning solution that offers significant efficiency, performance and cost-of-ownership (CoO) advantages compared to traditional resist stripping and post-etch residue removal … Read More → "EV Group and Dynaloy Jointly Develop Complete Single-Wafer Cleaning Solution for 3D-IC/TSV, Advanced Packaging, MEMS and Compound Semiconductor Applications"