Sematech’s ISMI subsidiary will no longer hold its ISMI Manufacturing Week event, instead holding a members-only gathering. Meanwhile, the Advanced Process Control (APC) conference will be held in September in Ann Arbor, after two years of being co-located with the ISMI symposium.

A French team is working on improving the resolution of directed assembly by adding sugar-based polymers. A Korean research group is working on forming channels by inducing controlled cracking techniques, while a Franco-American group is working on cheap, paper-based touchpads.

Mobile OEMs are looking for higher capacity and faster storage solutions, as the current interface technology standard is running out of steam. OEMs are now taking a hard look at a next-generation interface technology called Universal Flash Storage (UFS). The UFS interface is a serial communication bus that can be used in smartphones, tablets and even electronic toys.

Speaking at the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University of Albany, President Barack Obama said high corporate tax rates in the United States need to be changed in order to support a reversal of job outsourcing. GlobalFoundries CEO Ajit Manocha described plans for Fab 8 at Malta, N.Y., and said “American manufacturing is climbing back.”

A French lab said it has developed single-wavelength tunable lasers which could be used for integrated data communication ICs. Researchers in Singapore studied nanotwinned copper, which exhibits high strength and ductility. A Cornell team published its research into superconductors based on lithium, iron and arsenic.

New memory types, incluing ReRAMs and STT-RAMs, will be featured at the 2012 Symposium on VLSI Technology and Circuits, set for mid-June in Honolulu. Intel’s K. Zhang will give an invited paper on SRAMs using tri-gate transistors.

MIT researchers model thin films of bismuth-antimony, and find properties which could support faster ICs and thermoelectric devices. Berkeley Lab and UC-Berkeley report progress on an inexpensive technique for directing the self-assembly of nanoparticles into device-ready thin films.

The technology roadmap for semiconductors remains in flux, as there are more signs that the foundries may accelerate the insertion point for finFETs. And adding more uncertainty to the IC roadmap, various factions at a recent event debated over which technology – bulk, SOI or SuVolta – will scale and enable future designs.

Amid the industry’s insatiable thirst for more bandwidth, Cisco Systems said that it wants 2.5D/3D stacked devices sooner than later and is getting “impatient” with the progress of the technology. “We are always unhappy with the pace of technology,” said Mark Brillhart, vice president of technology and quality at networking equipment giant Cisco. “We’re very impatient.”

Setting the stage for intense competition in an emerging market, GlobalFoundries has officially entered the 2.5D/3D chip-stacking foundry arena. The company’s 2.5D/3D foundry strategy is far different than that of one major rival: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC).