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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kirk © who wrote (11685)	10/11/2004 1:16:24 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Respond to of 25522

IMEC signs on 10 equipment vendors for 45-nm efforts By Mark LaPedus Silicon Strategies 10/11/2004, 12:44 PM ET SAN JOSE, Calif. — Expanding its sub-45-nm research and development efforts, the Interuniversities MicroElectronics Center (IMEC) on Monday (Oct. 11) announced strategic partnership agreements with ten chip-equipment suppliers. IMEC (Leuven, Belgium), the European research and development organization, signed agreements with Aixtron, Applied Materials, ASM International, ASML, Dainippon Screen, FEI, KLA-Tencor, Lam Research, Tokyo Electron, and SEZ. The agreements allow IMEC to gain early know-how on future tool technologies, while also collaborating with leading semiconductor manufacturers. The move expands IMEC's sub-45-nm R&D efforts. Last year, IMEC announced that seven of the world's leading semiconductor manufacturers — Infineon Technologies, Intel, Matsushita, Philips, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments — had joined its sub-45-nm research programs as core partners (see Oct. 13 story). IMEC's sub-45-nm research currently includes seven programs: 193-nm immersion lithography and EUV; cleaning and contamination control; substrate modules: implementation of high-mobility layers and advanced source/drain engineering solutions; high-k dielectrics and metal gates; emerging devices, germanium-based devices; advanced interconnect solutions, and wafer-level packaging. "Scaling IC technology below 45-nm poses increasing challenges for the equipment industry and creates the need for tool suppliers to acquire early know-how on future process modules and devices," said Luc Van den hove, vice president silicon process and device technology at IMEC, in a statement. "These joint development agreements allow tool suppliers to closely interact with leading semiconductor manufacturers, enabling them to adopt to the most promising process steps and device concepts in an early stage and build up the critical knowledge to support these processes."