August 5, 2014, Emerging Display Technologies Conference, Santa Clara, CA—A panel evaluated the present and future capabilities for manufacturing high-performance displays. Paul Semenza from NPD DisplaySearch moderated, with panelists Akihiro Mochizuki from Light Polymers, Conor Madigan from Kateeva, Kevin Gahagan from Corning Glass, and SK Kim from Applied Materials. Semenza opened with market trends for…
July 7, 2014, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—An Steegen from IMEC described the requirements and readiness of next-generation processes for semiconductors. The production of semiconductors beyond 14nm is going to challenge our existing design and manufacturing flows and will take new devices and technologies to replace out CMOS infrastructure. The general industry directions are for…
November 20, 2013, Printed Electronics Show, Santa Clara, CA—Scott Sloss from Johnson & Johnson’s Lifescan division talked about the use of printed electronics in diagnostics and healthcare. This product category brings in $2.5B for J & J for the glucose test strips. Diabetes affects almost 400M people in the world, and half of these people…
July 8, 2013, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—Martin van den Brink from ASML discussed the progress and prospects for next-generation lithography. The challenge is to reduce costs and improve performance at the same time. Current assumptions are we will extend 193nm immersion lithography to 10nm. There are no fundamental limits with quad patterns, but logic…
July 8, 2013, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—Martin Anstice from Lam Research talked about inflection challenges and value creation opportunities from collaboration. The pace and costs of change in the semiconductor industry now make it an imperative for companies to work together. Value in this industry comes from the semiconductors, and not from the equipment….
July 8, 2013, IMEC Technology Forum, San Francisco—Luc van den Hove from IMEC described the overriding philosophies and some of the results of their research in his opening talk at the forum. The general concept for their work is the sum of minds. IMEC tries to bring together a wide range of diverse and complementary…
December 6, 2012, Printed Electronics USA, Santa Clara, CA—Toshihide Kamata from the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology updated the efforts on printed electronics in Japan. The organization is a research consortium of the big companies involved in printing, chemicals, and electronics. The focus is on large-area devices, using an ink-based, low-temperature process. Some…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Chan-Long Shieh from CBRITE described the efforts in moving metal oxide TFTs (MOTFT) into production on flexible plastic substrates. The issues in moving a technology from a rigid substrate to a flexible one are not insurmountable, but require much more research. The motivation for the work is to address…
July 11, 2012, FlexTech Alliance, San Francisco—Neil Morrison from Applied Materials described the changes in the industry and their efforts to provide production ready equipment for these new technologies. Although applied has been instrumental in driving transistor dimensions down into the nanometer range, they also are working in the other direction for LCD and PV…
March 20, 2012, ISQED, Santa Clara, CA—Venu Menon from TI talked about the special needs for analog designs. Digital designs have long taken for granted the high levels of abstraction and automation available for design, something that the analog world is starting to address. To set the stage, the real world is captured and measured…