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Politics : RAMTRONIAN's Cache Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: NightOwl who wrote (13609)	10/23/2007 10:25:41 AM
From: NightOwl	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 14464

"I can only assume that this spate of ferroelectric "research breakthroughs" is the result of somebody somewhere getting ready to award some R&D grant money. <vbg> It guess we can eliminate those "assumptions" now: eetimes.com 0\|0

To: NightOwl who wrote (13609)	11/23/2007 12:02:26 PM
From: NightOwl	Respond to of 14464

The Trends... Are they our friends? Roelandts: The big issue has been that the transition to 300 mm has not been very profitable for the equipment industry. That's partly because it took a long time to roll out the technology and partly because each time you move to bigger wafers you need less manufacturing, so you are kind of digging your own grave. Now there are rumblings about 450-mm wafers. I saw some statistics-- I don't know if they are true--that with 450-mm wafers at 32 nm, you only need seven fabs to produce all the transistors used in the world today. If you are Applied Materials, that's not much of a market. The equipment industry can't afford to go in this direction with so few players. eetimes.com MUNICH, Germany — The market for automotive networking nodes will grow at a pace of 14 percent annually to almost $1 billion, predicts market researcher Strategy Analytics. However, not all protocols will have a chance to get under the hood of future cars. Driven by the trend to comfort, entertainment and safety, the deployment of networks in cars will continue throughout the entire foreseeable future. While the global market for automotive network nodes represented a value of $344 million in 2006, it will expand to $975 million in 2014, predicts Strategy Analytics. The market expansion takes place in the conflicting fields of user demand, price pressure and the industry's endeavor to keep complexity at bay. eetimes.com Kind of looks like it to me. And if the "infant" ever grows up: *FeRAM is comparable to, or potentially better than, all other computer memory technologies in performance, and in addition has the very strong advantage of being 'non-volatile' - in other words when you switch off the power to your computer, the data that you forgot to save will not be lost. However, FeRAM is a still-maturing technology. Despite 2002 being seen as "a coming of age", it will need further development if it is to take over from the mainstream established Si-based systems. It is against this technological backdrop that the applicants seek to embark upon a highly adventurous programme, unlike any that are currently being reported in the global community. We propose a study focusing on two issues: the fabrication of nano-scale (below 100x10^(-9) m) capacitors through self assembly techniques (the capacitors form themselves and are therefore very cheap to make), and the investigation of the functional properties of the resulting nanoscale ferroelectric architectures (the properties of such small ferroelectric units are not well known). Self-assembly of capacitor structures: A novel and attractive way to create both high cell-density and ease in production is to capitalise on self-assembly of nanometre-scale capacitor structures. One of the members of the RESEARCH team has pioneered work in this field examining the self-assembly of top electrode material on a continuous film of ferroelectric, but other approaches have been to create islands of ferroelectric material on a continuous lower layer. The field is, however, only in its infancy. We propose to take forward the self-assembly of capacitor structures by using a technique developed by our RESEARCH group in which functionally active materials are deposited onto Si wafers coated in a thin film of porous aluminium oxide (where the pore size is in the nanometre scale range). Key advantages of this technique are that the resulting capacitor structures will be electrically isolated from each other, and their architectures will strongly mirror those used in FeRAM devices currently in production.* Message 23982807 0\|0