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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: StanX Long who wrote (60397)	2/13/2002 12:46:38 AM
From: StanX Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

UMC dropping Dow's SiLK from performance 130-nm process By Mike Clendenin EE Times (02/11/02 16:08 p.m. EST) siliconstrategies.com TAIPEI, Taiwan — After working with Dow Chemical's low-k dielectric film for nearly a year, United Microelectronics Corp. is preparing to drop Dow's SiLK from its high-performance 130-nanometer process, choosing a path different than that of development partner IBM Corp. The Taiwanese foundry is winding down the last few products using SiLK and offering instead a Coral-based dielectric film from Novellus Systems, which UMC calls "K-film." It has a similar dielectric constant to SiLK's — 2.7 — but UMC said it has found K-film easier to implement and more scalable. Also, K-film uses existing chemical vapor-deposition machinery already in place in UMC fabs, the company said. Even though UMC touted SiLK in the early days of its 130-nm implementation, the company pursued Coral as an alternative, said Fu-tai Liou, the sales and marketing chief and former chief technology officer at UMC. But difficulties, including cracking of the film because of untenable thermal expansion, plagued the smooth ramp-up of the material in a volume environment, he said.