These are without a doubt 300mm wafers. All the big semiconductor manufacturing vendors remember getting burned on the 200mm to 300mm conversion. Because it took much longer than planned to make their initial investment on that transition back, anything bigger hasn't happened anywhere other than as proof of concept demos as far I know. The R&D cost of building whole new tool platforms for bigger wafers is so massive that only a handful of customers would even be interesting is supporting it. I expect 300mm will be the high volume wafer size for quite a while.

SMIC is a great place to run a cheap wafer on possibly a ripped-off TSMC process from a few years ago. They have even had to settle in court over stealing IP. So I would expect this is much more about increasing capacity on the older generation 14nm and larger processes than pushing ahead to really compete at 5nm and beyond.

Did anyone else notice that the picture in the article is of a cyclist turning to head the wrong way down a one way street?
I ride my bike to work almost every day and the number of fellow cyclists who do not follow any rules of the road bothers me just as much as the cars that don't. I have almost been hit by fellow riders who were shocked that I stopped at a stop sign. As far as the barriers, I think it will help, you would not believe the number of people that are unable to stay out of the bike lane. Barriers would also prevent the worst case configuration where the bike lanes are between parked cars and traffic. Nobody EVER looks for bike traffic when they step out into a bike lane from their parked car.

It is interesting that there is now an additional supplier for EUV light sources other than Cymer. Ushio obviously has much lower intensity source than Cymer as they are targeting mask inspection rather than the lithography scanners themselves for this product. I wonder if they will continue research into make higher intensity sources as this has been one of the major issues keeping EUV from being adopted more widely so competition might help.

I did find the Ushio Press Release had more details than the Bloomberg article.

The only time I saw an EUV source was at SPIE several years back. It really did look like something that belonged on the Death Star rather than in a Fab.

Where I live they just posted the local university salaries in the paper. The president was 4th after the football coach, the assistant football coach, and the basketball coach. All of them are way over paid but I am most angry about the fact that the football coach made 4x what the president made.

I am pretty sure sure OP is referring to the fact that "4G" networks and devices that are sold come nowhere near the ITU-R's definition for a fourth generation wireless network. I know I do not get speeds anywhere near the low end of the 100Mb/s spec and getting 1Gb/s is completely impossible on my "4G" network.

Contrary to what the AC said subwavelength is not technobable. I am a lithographer. Its basically referring to being able to resolve images smaller than the wavelengths of light you are doing the imaging with. You cannot see a virus through a microscope because the visible light emitted from it has a wavelength that is too large to allow enough diffraction orders into the lens to allow it to resolve any valid features at your eye. This is the Rayleigh resolution criterion in action. In practical lithography cases we add in a K1 factor to Rayleigh's equation to quantify how difficult an imaging case is for a given wavelength and NA.

Subwavelength imaging has been around in semiconductor processing for decades with people using tricks such as off-axis illumination and phase shifting masks to allow a 365nm light source to print 200nm features or a 193nm light source to print 45nm features. If you have used a computer in the last 20 years odds are most of the critical layers were imaged using subwavelength imaging.

Looking at the pictures in the slides this looks very similar to a carbon nanotube memory process I worked on at my last job (we might have even been licensing some of the IP from these guys). We were looking for a way to shrink our microcontroller die by moving the EEPROM cells up into the metallization stacks. An additional benefit to this memory was that we would be able to increase the EEPROM memory size 2x (with a second layer of cells) with the addition of just 5 more masking layers and almost no increase in die size.

The process I worked on was nowhere near volume production when I left; but I do know we did have completely functional die with carbon nanotube memory. The one part of the process that was most challenging was dealing with the carbon nanotube spin on process. It took forever to get the right thickness uniformity and once you had it at the correct thickness you were rewarded with a material that had filled in your lithography alignment structures to the point they were almost worthless for the next patterning step. It was pretty cool tech to work on, I am glad it looks like somebody is getting it to work.

Its interesting that you say that. As somebody who works in fabs, I have always heard horror stories about the working conditions in zilogs fabs. Pretty much all of them are focused on the completely unrealistic (for semiconductor manufacturing) expectations of oil executives as to what process yields and cycle times should be. This was combined with managers that felt it was OK to stand on an employees desk and scream at them.

I work in semiconductor manufacturing. The very first place I worked out of college ran the manufacturing execution system on OpenVMS. It was a bit of an shock to get a log in to the VMS cluster on my first day as this was in the 2000s and I had only learned about VMS in my operating systems classes as a historical example. I have also noticed that the older Nikon imaging tools have OpenVMS running the main application controlling the tool.

I found OpenVMS to be a great zero frills system for doing this type of work. I am sure there are plenty of manufacturing sites that will be interested in the port to x86 so they can get some more modern (and reasonably priced) hardware to support their mission critical applications without having to start from scratch with a new system.

The article makes me think of the Hancock Tower in downtown Boston. It had all sorts of issues with the wind including the large glass panels falling from the building to the streets below.

This is just the latest round of lawsuits on this I assume they are trying to get as much cash as possible before it expires. I went to BU for my undergrad (even took solid state physics from Theodore Moustakas) and there was a similar undisclosed settlement in 2001-2002 about the same manufacturing process. The patent is not so much about having a blue LED but having a economical way to manufacture them on a mass scale.

There will also be a cost reduction from the more efficient use of the ARC (anti-reflective coating), top coats, and Photoresist applications on the larger wafers. Coat dispense volumes do not go up significantly with larger wafers in a spin coat application so you effectively get more imaging for the same volume of chemical. Seeing as many of the lithography materials are some of the most expensive in the process this benefit can be very significant. Of course controlling these thicknesses to within a few angstroms across essentially a medium pizza will be a major challenge.

Also I was pretty sure the SEMI standard was for 450mm wafers. It will be interesting to see how many people adopt the new equipment for 450mm production, because the up front costs will be astronomical.

Actually crime in the USA is also down.

I am not saying our extremely high incarceration rate is the primary cause for the reduction in crime. But in spite of what is commonly reported about America, crime is actually improving. I would expect if we did a similar reduction in sentences for drug offenders, and have some better support for those getting out of jail we would have gotten a bigger reduction probably at a lower cost, but being "soft on crime" does not help anyone win elections

As somebody who works in Lithography, I can let you know that they have not been using visible light for a long time. All fine resolution lithography is designed around as close to a monochromatic light source as possible. Having a significant spread in the light spectrum was just not consistent to do much below the 1.0 um feature size. This is because of the diffraction spread is very dependent on the wavelength and the fact that the photons have different energies thus reacting differently (or not at all) in the photoresist on the wafer.

Thus broadband lithography gave way to g-line (465nm visible blue) which gave way to i-line (365nm Ultra-Violet); Next was deep UV (248nm), Now 193nm is still used in state of the art systems today with lots of tricks such as immersion (where the light goes into water before it hits the wafer to increase the NA of the system) and double patterning (splitting up the image into multiple images that are combined in the etch processes after). Extreme UV is 13.5nm light is the next step but it is a very difficult light source to work with and the systems outrageous sums of money even for this industry.

What you are completely correct about is the importance of connectivity. I went from working in a dying 1xx nm CMOS fab this year to a thriving 1.0+um fab that makes wireless components. The lithographic part of the process (and just cramming more and more transistors on a die) is not the key value to our customers; its the exotic materials that we use to target more and more bands of wireless connectivity. I expect there will always be a demand in the market for more and faster transistors for pure computation. Its unfortunately no longer where the market growth is; thus the ROI on developing these technologies is looking more and more risky for businesses. What I have found interesting is that just about everybody working on the high end of the industry is pretty confident that the transistors will work at the 5nm-7nm node so there is still an incentive to head in that direction for now. After that will require some radical re-thinking about the materials used in computational machines.

But this is Slashdot, NOBODY is going to actually RTFA.