Machinery & Equipment

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) announced its wafer-bonding machine has bonded SiC wafers and GaN wafers with silicon wafers at room temperature for the first time in the industry.

ULVAC, Inc. has started marketing a solar cell measurement system that would cut the time required to measure the conversion efficiency of a tandem thin-film solar cell substrate to about one eighth by evaluating the substrate without destroying it.

Disco Corp., a dicing saw supplier with about 70% of the world market, has added the DAD3650 system equipped with dual spindles to its manual loading dicing saw series to double throughput.

Panasonic Corp. has developed a 3D profilometer that can measure surface profiles of components, devices or molds with an accuracy margin of plus or minus 0.15 micron at a speed of 2 mm per second, about one digit more precise than existing systems, according to the company. The system also enables nondestructive evaluation of holes.

Initium, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Ulvac, Inc., specialized in quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) measurement systems capable of determining molecule reaction in real-time without labeling, will start marketing next month a new system that minimizes handling quantities to samples of 400 - 550 microliters-about one-tenth that required by its current systems.

Advantest Corp. has developed and started marketing a memory test system, the T5503 8448 Channel Test Head, capable of testing 256 DDR3 SDRAM memory dies in parallel, making it the industry's fastest such system-with twice the throughput of the previous model, the T5503.

ASML Holding NV (ASML) has announced the NXT:1950i, its first double-patterning system for mass production, at SEMICON Japan being held this week at Makuhari Messe near Tokyo.

Ulvac Inc. has announced the development of a mass-production system for thin-film lithium-ion batteries, which it claims is the first of its kind in the world and capable of fabricating rechargeable batteries as thin as 50 microns.

Dainippon Screen Mfg Co., Ltd. has announced the development of a technology capable of drying 300mm wafers without using isopropyl alcohol (IPA), a world's first. IPA is one of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) considered to contribute to atmospheric pollution.

Nikon Corp. will release the NSR-S620 ArF immersion scanner for mass-production process using double patterning technology for 32nm-node chip production in the fourth quarter of 2009, about a year from now (Press release).