Semiconductor Manufacturing Research News
Magnetic Technique Used for Reliability Testing
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology said they have used the force generated by magnetic repulsion to measure the adhesion strength between thin films of materials.
The approach can be used in measurements of microelectronic devices, photovoltaic cells and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
MAPT sample (Source: Georgia Institute of Technology
The magnetically actuated peel test (MAPT) is a non-contact approach which could assist designers in improving the resistance to thermal and mechanical stresses, said professor Suresh Sitaraman. “This technique would provide designers with the information they need to choose the right materials to meet future design specifications over the lifetimes of devices.”
The technique was used to measure the adhesion strength between layers of copper conductor and silicon dioxide insulator. They also plan to use it to study fatigue cycling failure, which occurs over time as the interface between layers is repeatedly placed under stress. The technique may also be used to study adhesion between layers in photovoltaic systems and in MEMS devices.
The research was reported in the March 30, 2012 issue of the journal Thin Solid Films.
X-Ray Technique Probes Organic Materials
North Carolina State University researchers have developed an X-ray technique which may be used to develop printable electronics, such as transistors and solar cells, based on organic polymers.
NC State physicist Harald Ade said manufacturers now use a process of trial and error. “We wanted to give them a way to characterize these materials so that they could see what they had and why it was working.”
The research team went Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Advanced Light Source (ALS) to use X-rays to determine how individual molecules within these materials organize. They found that the best-performing devices were characterized by particular molecular alignments within the materials.
The researchers’ results appear in the journal Nature Materials. The abstract says that thus far, molecular-scale ordering in soft matter could be characterized with X-ray or electron microscopy techniques only if the sample exhibited sufficient crystallinity. “Here, we show that the resonant scattering of polarized soft X-rays (P-SoXS) by molecular orbitals is not limited by crystallinity and that it can be used to probe molecular orientation down to size scales of 10 nm,” the authors said.
Multi-core Cache Techniques Extendable
Researchers have shown how multi-core processors can continue to scale, using well-known shared-cache techniques. Sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the computer scientists said they have identified a path to scale memory communications among the cores, without having to rewrite all of the software from scratch.
The solution described by the researchers brings together a combination of identified techniques for creation of cache-coherent shared memory. The SRC-guided research allows one or more caches to hold the subset of memory locations that most recently have been written and read by the core.
“We have refuted calls for a radical design change by showing that, using already existing techniques, we can create cache coherence protocols that scale to hundreds and perhaps even thousands of cores,” they said.
- by David Lammers
Tags: georgia institute of technology, inspection, semiconductor manufacturing, SRC