Free Republic

Engineers have long dreamed of creating a wonderful material that can revolutionize construction. In 2004, their dream came true. British scientists first created Graphene—one of the forms of nanocarbon that is only 0.3 nanometers thick—a million times thinner than a human hair, but it can withstand colossal loads! Many immediately predicted a great future for it, and a little later, scientists were given the Nobel Prize. However, mass adoption did not happen. And only now, after 15 years, the first real opportunities have appeared to use the material of the future in commercial projects. Super-substance is made from ordinary graphite,...

The biggest hurdle is an electron microscope for examining the features of his transistors. A good friend found a broken one and with $1000, a fair amount of know how and a lot of time they were able to repair it to working condition. As for the photolithography device? The light from a conference room projector is beamed through a microscope to trigger the light sensitive coating on his wafers Zeloof’s chip was his second. He made the first, much smaller one as a high school senior in 2018; he started making individual transistors a year before that. His chips...

Ohio has landed what could become the biggest semiconductor operation on Earth. Chip giant Intel plans to officially announce Friday that it will invest $20 billion to build two computer chip plants in Jersey Township in Licking County in what will be Ohio's largest economic development project to date. State and local officials are set to gather in Newark this afternoon to celebrate the news.

Have you heard the one about the dead cars? No, not the ones we find in junkyards, but the ones that haven’t had life yet, thanks to the chip shortage. These so-called “dead” cars are vehicles that have rolled off the assembly line, otherwise ready for sale, sitting in fields or on lots near the factories that produced them, just waiting for chips The New York Times even recently recounted an anecdote from a dealer principal who took a pilgrimage to a Ford factory to see all the “dead” cars for himself. We weren’t able to pin down a reliable...

A Chinese-owned company said on Monday that it had acquired the UK’s largest manufacturer of silicone and semiconductor. The deal has triggered warnings from MPs. Nexperia, a Dutch-based semiconductor manufacturer wholly owned by China’s Wingtech Technology, confirmed on Monday that it had obtained 100 percent ownership of Welsh semiconductor plant Newport Wafer Fab (NWF), and will rename it “Nexperia Newport.” British MP and chair of the Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee Tom Tugendhat has previously warned the government about the deal. In a letter (pdf) to Secretary of State for Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) Kwasi Kwarteng last month,...

At the beginning of May, we noted that Taiwan Semiconductor was considering bolstering its production in the U.S., and that President Biden's Commerce Secretary was urging more domestic production. Now, it looks like TSMC could be within striking distance of a serious U.S. expansion. The chipmaking giant is "weighing plans to pump tens of billions of dollars more into cutting-edge chip factories in the U.S. state of Arizona than it had previously disclosed", a Reuters exclusive revealed Friday morning.The company had already said it was going to invest $10 billion to $12 billion in Arizona. Now, the company is mulling...

Some of the world's biggest chip buyers, including Apple Inc (AAPL.O), Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) and Alphabet Inc's (GOOGL.O) Google, are joining top chip-makers such as Intel Corp (INTC.O) to create a new lobbying group to press for government chip manufacturing subsidies.

China’s new policies encourage U.S. and foreign semiconductor companies—including those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau—to transfer certain technology, intellectual property (IP), talent, and research and development (R&D) to operations in China. These policies target capabilities across the semiconductor value chain, including integrated circuit (IC) design, fabrication, equipment, software design and tools, packaging and testing, and materials. These policies offer preferential terms over the next ten years—including tax, tariff, financing, and IP protection—for firms willing to establish capabilities, including production facilities, in China. These policies require companies to transfer certain IP—including a specific number of invention patents, depending on the...

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) is preparing legislation to expand production of semiconductors only weeks after his family members purchased stock in semiconductor tool manufacturers. Wyden and two other Democrat senators released a statement to announce they were working on legislation to “expand production of critical technologies like semiconductors, batteries and solar components” in the name of “economic recovery.” ‘By building on tools with records of success, we can also boost manufacturing in communities that have been left behind. We are working on new legislation that would expand production of critical technologies like semiconductors, batteries and solar components....

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – The chip shortages slowing car production are a symptom of broader increased demand that is placing strains on suppliers across the semiconductor sector, according to Dutch equipment maker ASML. One of ASML’s top executives said that higher demand for most types of computer chips — including those considered one step below cutting edge — looks stronger and more permanent than most players in the industry, including ASML, had expected when the coronavirus pandemic began. “I think all over the place…the demand to our customers — so the semiconductor manufacturers — I would say that all over the...

Globalfoundries Inc. has emerged as the lead candidate to buy International Business Machines Corp.'s semiconductor manufacturing operations, people familiar with the matter said. IBM has also held talks with chip makers Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., these people said. TSMC has dropped out of the talks, the people said. Intel is still involved, but Globalfoundries appears to have a stronger interest, these people said. Talks between IBM and Globalfoundries are ongoing and a deal isn't imminent, these people said. The transaction involves thorny issues, including control of intellectual property and terms under which the ultimate buyer of the...

GlobalFoundries to Establish Massive R&D Center Near Fab 8 GlobalFoundries on Tuesday said it would build its new technology development center (TDC) at its Fab 8 campus in Saratoga County, New York. The TDC will provide a collaborative space to develop end-to-end solutions covering the full spectrum of silicon technology, from new interconnect and packaging technologies that enable three-dimensional (3D) stacking of chips to leading-edge photomasks for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography and everything in between.“As the industry shifts from the PC era to a market focused on mobile devices, we have seen increasingly strong interest from customers in migrating to...

A new anti-counterfeiting requirement from the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) at Fort Belvoir, Va., is triggering pushback from semiconductor manufacturers, who claim the new requirement is not an appropriate cure for electronics counterfeiting, does not authenticate legacy semiconductors, has not been tested adequately, and will increase semiconductor manufacturing costs. The DNA-marking mandate, which became effective on 15 November requires all semiconductors sold to the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) to be marked with DNA-based materials unique to each government contractor. The intent is to prevent counterfeit parts from entering the DOD supply chain by authenticating each piece with a...

Air Force Office of Scientific Research and National Science Foundation-funded professor, Dr. Xiang Zhang has demonstrated at the University of California, Berkeley the world's smallest semiconductor laser, which may have applications to the Air Force in communications, computing and bio-hazard detection. The semiconductor, called a plasmon, can focus light the size of a single protein in a space that is smaller than half its wavelength while maintaining laser-like qualities that allow it to not dissipate over time. "Proposed almost seven years ago, researchers had been unable to demonstrate a working plasmonic laser until our experiment," said Zhang. "It is an...

Earlier this week, as 3,000 employees of Spansion, the Sunnyvale semiconductor company, were being laid off, many of their bosses were getting pay increases. That juxtaposition — against the backdrop of the deteriorating economy and nationwide anger about greedy executives — has triggered outrage among the workers who have been let go. Scores of the laid-off workers jammed a West San Jose pizza parlor Thursday to join two class-action lawsuits against the firm and to vent their anger. "It's just callous," said 38-year-old Eric Rebaker of Boulder Creek, who lost his job as a Spansion plant maintenance specialist. "To hurt...

A research group in Germany has discovered a semiconducting material that can switch its semiconducting properties -- turning from one type of semiconductor to another -- via a simple change in temperature. This intriguing behavior may make the material useful in efforts to create better performing integrated circuits, which form the backbone of almost all electronic devices. Semiconductors are essential to integrated circuits, and any significant advances in semiconductor materials could mean big changes for the future of electronic technologies. For example, this new finding may further developments in data-storage technology. At a more fundamental level, the material could change...

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...