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PALO ALTO, Calif. -- Fifty years ago, Jack Kilby, who grew up in Great Bend, Kan., took the electrical engineering knowledge he acquired as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois and a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin to Dallas, to Texas Instruments, where he helped invent the modern world as we routinely experience and manipulate it. Working with improvised equipment, he created the first electronic circuit in which all the components fit on a single piece of semiconductor material half the size of a paper clip. On Sept. 12, 1958, he demonstrated this microchip, which was enormous,...

Will the building block of life become the building block of the semiconductor industry? It's possible. Scientists at IBM are conducting research into arranging carbon nanotubes--strands of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity--into arrays with DNA molecules. Once the nanotube array is meticulously constructed, the laboratory-generated DNA molecules could be removed, leaving an orderly grid of nanotubes. The nanotube grid, conceivably, could function as a data storage device or perform calculations. "These are DNA nanostructures that are self-assembled into discrete shapes. Our goal is to use these structures as bread boards on which to assemble carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, quantum...

(A) The thin film transistor array on a glass substrate. Inset: A magnified transparent transistor. (B) Scanning electron microscope image of the network of SWNTs. Image credit: Eun Ju Bae, et al. The ability to create flexible, transparent electronics could lead to a host of novel applications, such as e-paper and electronic car windshields. Now, scientists have constructed a transistor made of a network of nanotubes that may serve as an essential component in a trans-flex device. Such devices require two main components: light displays and current-controlling transistors. While scientists have found that OLEDs and LCDs work well as...

They weren't out to make history, the eight young engineers who met secretly with investor Arthur Rock 50 years ago to form Silicon Valley's ancestral chip company, Fairchild Semiconductor. The men, among them future Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, mainly wanted to escape their brilliant but batty boss, William Shockley, who had just shared the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in the invention of the transistor. Shockley, who had started a company in Mountain View in 1955 to commercialize this breakthrough, had bullied and browbeaten his young engineering staff, whose numbers included future venture capitalist Eugene Kleiner, at...

BEIJING — Intel Corp. confirmed Monday (March 26) that it will build a $2.5 billion, 300-mm wafer fab in the northern Chinese city of Dalian. Fab 68 will begin construction later this year and is expected to go online in 2010, using 90-nanometer technology to "initially" make chip sets, the company said. Fab 68 will be Intel's first wafer plant in Asia, and is its first in 15 years at a new site. The project is a major coup for China, which is campaigning to move up the technology food chain and to clean up its poor track record on...

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MONTEREY, Calif. — Startup Artimi Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) has unveiled a WiMedia-compliant dual-mode wireless USB and Bluetooth chip. Including both a media-access controller (MAC) and programmable applications processor, Artimi's A-150 chip is intended to help OEMs add WiMedia-based wireless USB and Bluetooth 3.0 communications capabilities to devices. The dual-mode chip provides up to 480-Mbit/s wireless communications to peripherals, adding just 60 milliwatts of power consumption to handheld devices. For older peripherals, thumb-sized USB devices with a A-150 inside can be plugged into the existing USB port to turn it into a wireless peripheral. The MAC and applications processor are...

Significant growth at Chelmsford, Mass.-based Hittite Microwave has pushed the company into the top 10 suppliers of Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) chips for the electronics industry, as Sony (NYSE: SNE) , NEC (Nasdaq: NIPNY) and Eudyna Devices all slipped in the rankings, a new report shows. Mitsubishi Electric and Toshiba , meantime, gained market share. Mitsubishi was the Japanese market leader last year in the GaAs device market, and saw "significant growth" for its mobile business as it led supply of power amplifiers to the 3G cellular handset market, according to the report by Strategy Analytics.

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials. Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to grow and etch the thin films of material that become electronic circuits for computers and other electronic devices. But as thin as those chips might seem, they are quite beefy in comparison to the result of a new UW-Madison semiconductor fabrication process detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Applied Physics. A team led by electrical and computer engineer Zhenqiang (Jack)...

Researchers at the University of Toronto have created a semiconductor device that outperforms today's conventional chips -- and they made it simply by painting a liquid onto a piece of glass. The finding, which represents the first time a so-called "wet" semiconductor device has bested traditional, more costly grown-crystal semiconductor devices, is reported in the July 13 issue of the journal Nature."Traditional ways of making computer chips, fibre-optic lasers, digital camera image sensors – the building blocks of the information age – are costly in time, money, and energy," says Professor Ted Sargent of the Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department...

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- How's this for a perk? A free iPod from the boss. National Semiconductor is giving each of its 8,500 employees a video iPod. It helps that National makes the chips used in many digital audio players and other portable entertainment devices. A statement from the company said the iPod giveaway caps its best year ever. The iPods aren't just to entertain workers. The company said it will communicate with employees via downloaded podcasts and other media playable on the iPods.

Is Intel about to rid itself of 16,000 workers - just over 16 per cent of its global workforce - later this month? So suggest whispers doing the rounds among Silicon Valley's technology community at the moment. That's what blogger Omid Rahmat claims (http://omid.tomshardware.com/2006/05/intels_amd_mome.html?www.reghardware.co.uk) at least. It's certainly no secret that Intel is examining every part of its business for signs of under-performance - CEO Paul Otellini said as much in April this year. "In terms of non-performing businesses, anything with a bracket will be looked at," he said. "It would be too simplistic to simply do a reduction in...

SAN JOSE, Calif. — T. J. Rodgers is surrounded by a sea of silicon wafers on the roof of his company's headquarters in a Silicon Valley industrial park. No, not the ones that Mr. Rodgers, who founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982, used to make high-speed computer memories or the newer specialized chips that go into iPods and high-end Mercedes-Benzes. These wafers are soaking up the sun's rays and turning them into electricity. On the roof, he fusses over the occasional weed that has grown up in the cracks between the panels and speculates about using robots to keep the glass...

Nanotechnology is officially on the road map. A handful of futuristic chip-making technologies at the atomic scale have been added to an industry planning effort that charts the future of the semiconductor manufacturing industry every two years. The transition to a post-silicon era is forecast in a report called the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, to be issued Saturday. The report, which is produced cooperatively by semiconductor industry associations from Europe, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the United States, is used by the semiconductor industry as a planning tool to determine how best to spend research and development money for new...

LONDON — Venture capital funding in the electronics and semiconductor sectors rebounded strongly in August as the deal flow and values belied its reputation as a month for vacations. EE Times' Venture Capital Counter (VCC) recorded 18 deals, which raised $229.80 million up from $180.15 million in July and far outstripping August 2004, when just $46.9 million was raised across 8 deals. Two California deals — Cortina Systems and Alloptic Inc. — each raised $30 million helping to drive up the average deal value. The deals recorded in August showed a typical geographical distribution with 13 U.S. deals, 5 in...

Alien Technology likes to think both big and small. The company has built a semiconductor chip assembly factory in Morgan Hill that has the capacity to assemble 2 billion chips a year. In North Dakota, the company is building another factory that can produce 20 billion chips a year. That's more than the 1 billion chips that Intel, the world's biggest chip maker, ships in a year. The reason Alien has such capacity is that its chips are a fraction of the size of Intel's. They're tiny specks, about the size of ground pepper, known as ``radio frequency identification'' chips....

MP's wife introduced him to Saddam sympathiser, writes CAMERON SIMPSON and AARON HICKLIN GEORGE Galloway first met the shadowy figure of Fawaz Zureikat through his Palestinian wife. The fateful meeting was to propel the man who goes under the soubriquets of "Gorgeous George" and the "MP for Baghdad Central" into one of the biggest crises of his colourful career. Dr Amineh Abu-Zayyad, 36, a Jerusalem-born scientist who married Mr Galloway in a secret ceremony in London in February 2000, had gone to the same university in Jordan as Mr Zureikat. Mr Zureikat's name first surfaced in a letter from Mr...

Fawaz Zureikat, George Galloway's Jordanian partner who claims not to be involved in oil deals, is closely associated with a company that has traded Iraqi crude valued at millions of pounds, according to United Nations documents seen by The Daily Telegraph. Mr Zureikat has dismissed as a "forgery" an Iraqi intelligence report identifying him as the front man for Mr Galloway's secret contracts to buy Iraqi crude and sell humanitarian supplies under the UN's oil-for-food programme. The Jordanian businessman has repeatedly insisted that he does not deal in oil, although he does sell food and other civilian supplies to Iraq....

Combined electron and ion beam imprinter opens the way for numerous applications An ion-beam system that simultaneously combines focused beams of electrons and positive ions promises to improve the versatility, efficiency, and economy of this important technology. The new system was developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who report its principles and applications in the 8 November 2004 issue of "Applied Physics Letters." Focused ion beams are important in the semiconductor industry, where they are used to carve structures with dimensions measured in billionths of a meter, repair defects in masks used for photolithography,...

Samsung Initiates $75 Million Second-Stage Expansion of Austin PlantSamsung Begins Construction for Plant Expansion Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. recently broke ground on the second-stage expansion of its Austin memory-chip-fabrication plant. Samsung Pacific Construction Co. is the general contractor for the 34,000-sq.-ft. $75 million project. The Southwest District office of Greeley, Colo.-based Hensel Phelps is the structural subcontractor. The expansion of the company's manufacturing area is part of a succession of investments intended to equip the Austin plant for next-generation advanced-semiconductor-fabrication technology. In May 2003 Samsung announced a three-year investment plan of $500 million to upgrade, expand and increase capacity to...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.When is a trade policy triumph not a trade policy triumph? Too often, when it's negotiated by the U.S. government. The latest U.S.-China deal on semiconductor trade may break from this dismal pattern. But the Bush administration and its predecessor have performed so miserably on the trade policy front that plenty of skepticism is justified about the July 8 announcement that Washington persuaded Beijing to agree to halt discriminatory policies that favored semiconductors produced in China over imports. The specifics of the agreement revealed thus far and the administration's deliberately tunnel-visioned approach...

U.S. and China Resolve Semiconductor Trade Dispute (Update2) July 8 (Bloomberg) -- China, the world's third-largest and fastest-growing computer chip market, bowed to pressure from Bush administration trade officials and agreed to drop a tax break that U.S. semiconductor makers said put them at a disadvantage. ``Effective immediately, China will not certify any new semiconductor products or manufacturers for eligibility for VAT refunds,'' U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said at a news conference in Washington. Payments to companies already taking advantage of the tax break will stop by April 1. Companies in China's $18 billion chip market were eligible for...

SHANGHAI, China — In the heart of a bustling free-trade zone in Shanghai, a $500 million Intel plant readies the flagship Pentium 4 chips that run the latest generation of computers. Hundreds of Chinese workers in lab coats monitor diamond-tipped wafer saws and other automated equipment, testing and assembling chips for the world market. Intel's plant is the largest investment in the zone, a former patch of farmland where more than 5,000 multinationals have set up shop. But just down the road, China's own Silicon Valley is emerging. In a vast high-tech park, gleaming glass-and-concrete buildings are sprouting up along...

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Global sales of chips rose by a record 31 percent year-on-year in February as consumers and businesses snapped up computers and mobile phones and prices rose on the back of tighter supply, a survey found on Friday Global sales of semiconductors rose to $15.58 billion in February, up 0.2 percent compared with the previous month, according to numbers from the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS). "That's the highest year-on-year comparison we've seen so far," said analyst Nicolas Gaudois at Deutsche Bank. The month-on-month sales increase was the highest since 1986, he added. He referred to the sales...

Chinese government policies that favor Chinese companies over foreign firms are driving some U.S. tech companies from the booming market. This month, chipmakers Intel and Broadcom said they'll stop selling wireless Internet, or Wi-Fi, chips in China. A new law requires that the chips include a security technology licensed by Chinese companies. The technology can hurt chips' performance and compatibility with other devices, says Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy. And implementing it requires U.S. chipmakers to share valuable intellectual property with Chinese companies, says Semiconductor Industry Association President George Scalise. The Wi-Fi dispute is one of several being waged between the...

U.S. Spurns China's Tax on Chips By Michael Singer U.S. Trade officials filed a case at the World Trade Organization Thursday asking that China drop its 17 percent value-added tax (VAT) on imported semiconductors and integrated circuits. While not a legal lawsuit, the complaint suggests that the preferential tax treatment to chips produced in China is harming the U.S. and other imports. In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Zoellick said the U.S. believes that the discriminatory tax policy is inconsistent with the national treatment obligations that China assumed when it joined the WTO in December 2001. The USTR...

China is facing a complaint at the World Trade Organisation for the first time since its joined in early 2002. The complaint comes from the US, and represents a further intensification of Washington DC's accusation that China's trade policy is costing US jobs. The WTO case concerns tax breaks for Chinese semiconductor makers, which the US says gives them an unfair advantage. China, US trade chief Robert Zoellick said, "must live up to its obligations" to create a "level playing field". The move follows recent efforts by lawmakers on both sides of US politics - as well as unions -...

Struggling Austin semiconductor section will become its own public company Motorola Inc. soon will send its semiconductor business out into the world as a separate company with new marching orders: Sink or swim. Management of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based communications conglomerate announced early Monday that it will spin off its financially struggling semiconductor operations in a stock offering that should be completed next year. If successful, it would create the Austin area's second-largest public company behind Dell Inc. "We're pretty pumped about it,' said Ray Burgess, the director of strategy for Motorola's semiconductor business, which begain in Phoenix in 1949. So...

Pentagon Is Told To Focus On Health Of Semiconductor Industry Or Risk Buying Chips From China The Department of Defense and the federal intelligence community must take action within the next few months to address the potential loss of the U.S. semiconductor industrial base, says Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), ranking member of the Airland subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The migration of production capacity to China along with research, design and engineering capabilities have "grave national security implications," says Lieberman in a new white paper on the subject. "We are being confronted by one of the greatest transfers...

Vitesse shuts down fab, exits optical module businessBy Semiconductor Business News July 23, 2003 (11:47 a.m. EST) CAMARILLO, Calif. — Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. will close its wafer fab in Colorado Springs, Colo., after it was unable to find a buyer for the plant. The company also formally exited the optical module business amid financial losses in its communications chip business. Vitesse also reported sales of $39.7 million in the third quarter, compared to $38.9 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2002. The net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2003 was $95 million, a $0.47 loss per share,...

IBM launches Indian design centerBy K.C. Krishnadas, EE Times May 21, 2003 (7:56 AM) URL: http://www.eedesign.com/story/OEG20030521S0022BANGALORE, India — IBM Corp. will establish a new technology design center to supply advanced chips, cards and systems to companies across Asia. The center, based here, will coordinate regional engineering, research and technology design services from various IBM locations around the world. It will also design a variety of new electronic products for customers, ranging from chips to entire systems. IBM's other technology centers, which assist customers in designing new products, are located in the United States (five) and one each in Germany...

Infineon inks deal for North Carolina facilityBy Margaret Quan, EE Times May 16, 2003 (4:00 p.m. EST) URL: http://www.theworkcircuit.com/story/OEG20030516S0044MANHASSET, N.Y. — Infineon Technologies AG plans to expand its East Coast presence with the acquisition of a facility in North Carolina stemming from an investment deal that could provide $9.5 million over 11 years in exchange for 400 jobs. Under terms of the deal, Infineon will take over an office complex in Cary, N.C., this fall to house research and development, human resource, IT, logistics, finance and administrative functions. It wil also invest $8 million in land, building, infrastructure and...

Solar cells aiming for full spectrum efficiency10:15 08 December 02 Solar power is set for a boost with the help of a material that can soak up energy from almost all of the Sun's spectrum. It should allow solar cells to jump in efficiency from today's best of 30 percent to 50 percent or higher.Solar cells use layers of semiconductors to absorb photons of sunlight and convert them into electric current. But each different semiconductor can only use photons at a specific energy - its "bandgap".Today's best cells have layers of two different semiconductors stacked together to absorb light at different energies but they...

By Nam In-soo Reuters Monday, April 22, 2002; 6:30 AM SEOUL, April 22-Micron Technology Inc signed on Monday a tentative deal worth about $3.4 billion to buy most of the assets of South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc in a move that would reshape the world computer memory chip market. If the purchase goes through, U.S.-based Micron would leapfrog South Korea's Samsung Electronics to become the world's largest memory chip maker, and Hynix, currently ranked third, would drop out of the sector. The deal gives the two companies and Hynix's creditors until April 30 to finalise a pact and it would...