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Over the last decade ZnO nanostructures were intensively and extensively studied by many research groups all over the world not only for their remarkable chemical and physical properties, but also for their current and future technological applications. The aim of this chapter is to give a comprehensive overview of the synthesis methods and growth mechanisms as well as the diverse properties of ZnO nanostructures. According to the ZnO morphology, the chapter shows the most important applications. In particular, the functional properties of ZnO nanostructures in photovoltaic's, chemical and gas sensing, electronic, optical, optoelectronic, and energy-harvesting devices are reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usage of electronics and sensors in modern vehicles is constantly increasing. The quality demands of the automotive supply chain require complex manufacturing execution systems (MES) and data analysis tools (data mining). On one hand, the constant demand for increase in efficiency leads to bigger wafer sizes and more automation in the fabs. On the other hand this causes problems with products of small quantities, where the meaning of ˵small″ is continuously rising with wafer size and automation. New products such as MEMS devices and microsystems increase these problems, because the processes must here also be adapted to the products. The established tools are not sufficient to comply with the continuously increasing demands. The use of modern production control systems and methods are thus presented using the ELMOS group as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of our recent activity on fabrication and investigation of three-dimensional opal-semiconductor and opal-metal photonic crystals. The main goal of our work is to create materials where functional properties of opal pore fillers could be combined with unique features of photonic crystals based on synthetic opals. The novel properties of such materials open new possibilities to mould and control emission and propagation of light in visible and near-infrared photonic and optoelectronic devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aluminum wires are electrochemically etched into bi-directional anodic alumina (AAO) templates for the growth and contacting of nanowires as three terminal devices. The use of this nanostructured template is shown by a ZnO nanowire surrounding gate field-effect transistor. Fabrication procedures and preliminary device characteristics of this bottom-up approach to nanowire transistors are shown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last half century, systems such as those incorporated in electronic equipment and their constituent semiconductors coexisted favorably and supplemented each other while individually performing their own duties. In the 1990s, while low-price semiconductors with yet higher performance than those required by the systems became available, the market however started to see critical quality problems and the manpower and time required for system development increased. These problems are considered to be a result of the improper use of computer-aided design (CAD) that kept pouring an abundant supply of semiconductors into hardware logic circuits and program codes while failing to design what the systems should be like. Presenting two systems which the authors are currently developing, this paper proposes a new method of designing effective systems while minimizing the costs necessary for system development, production and operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the semiconductor industry has been a high-growth business. Yield improvement becomes more and more important for semiconductor manufacturing process and it's the important element to ensure the profitability. Defect spatial patterns impede yield and it reveal the root causes of the occurred defects. This research developed a defect spatial pattern recognition methodology. In this research, defect spatial patterns are classified into seven categories, Curve Type, Line Type, Local Type, Ring Type, Radial Type, and Repeat Type and Die Edge Type. Original defects are filtered to eliminate random defects. With random defect removed, a clustering method is designed to cluster systematic defects. Clustered defects are then analyzed with minimum rectangle. A feature extraction procedure based on wavelet transform is developed to extract features that represent different defect patterns. By setting feature vectors into feature space and applying hierarchical agglomerative algorithm to clustering, it is expected to reach the goal of description and classification. The presented methodology is verified with real industrial data from a famous semiconductor company. The experimental results show the presented methodology is able to recognize defect patterns with recognition accuracy of 95%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, semiconductor manufacturing has emerged to one of the most important industries in Taiwan. To decrease cost, semiconductor manufacturing companies always aim for yield enhancement. The analysis of Wafer Bin Maps (WBMs) is important for yield improvement. WBMs are formed by process, and thus engineers can find clues from their patterns and then correlate them with specific process to discover root causes. Nowadays, the recognition of WBMs is performed manually. This paper presented a method helps to automatically recognize known WBMs patterns and to further enhance yield. With Spatial Signature Analysis, systematic patterns of WBMs are extracted and noises are eliminated. Moreover, Wavelet transform coefficients are used here to construct Neural Network model. Real data sets are collected from a famous semiconductor manufacturing company to verify the presented method. Four types of WBMs patterns, center, edge, local, and ring types are selected for verification. Experimental results showed that with adequate parameter settings, the method can successfully recognize the pattern types and distinguish between random and systematic WBMs. There were 17 testing samples, and 16 of them were recognized correctly. The accuracy was 94.12%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liquid-crystalline (LC) polymers that exhibit ionic or electronic conduction are described. Anisotropic and efficient transportation of electrons and ions is expected for these materials. The ordered LC nanostructures of LC polymers having ion- or electron-active moieties are important for efficient anisotropic transport. For electron-conductive materials, we focus on side-chain LC polymers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter probes the strengths and weaknesses of the model of high-technology industry creation through leverage, and the underlying conditions that account for the industry's success or failure. We have shown in previous chapters that Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and, to some extent, Malaysia have mastered leverage strategies for the creation of high-technology industries, in particular semiconductors, while similar strategies appear to be working well in other countries of the region, notably China. But how effective have these strategies really been? They may have created viable and well-balanced semiconductor industries that are capable of sustaining themselves, but have they worked in other sectors and cases? Is there a coherence in their repeated applications? Are there counter-examples? How widespread is their applicability? Is their success, such as it is, contingent on certain industry characteristics? Is a leverage strategy more likely to work in one kind of industry than another? We aim, then, to look at the leverage strategies to find out how and why they work. We also seek to establish the extent to which they are spreading and why. There are three cases to consider: further leverage in the same core countries of East Asia as they continue to upgrade their knowledge-intensive industries; leverage by other countries in East Asia such as China; and leverage by advanced firms in the technologically advanced countries. We shall look for evidence of coherent application of leverage strategies in all three cases in order to establish their significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our exposition so far has provided a detailed account of the creation of the semiconductor industry in four East Asian countries. We have analysed the organisational and institutional strategies employed, and sought to account for the achievements outlined in Chapter 1. We now shift gear to examine the strategies employed in comparative perspective, probing them for strengths and weaknesses. In this chapter, we confine our attention to the semiconductor industry, looking at the character of the industry created in each of the different countries, and extrapolating from this to analyse, at least to a first approximation, what may be the core strengths and the potential pitfalls of the leverage and learning approach to creating new industries. The advantage of our approach is that we are focusing on a single industry, over the course of its entire trajectory. Thus, many of the concerns and issues expressed in more general terms by other scholars can be tackled with greater precision in the case of this specific industry, and be subjected to more searching scrutiny. We examine the institutional pathways followed by the industry creation process characteristic of each country, look at their commonalities and differences, and attempt to account for them. The implications of such an analysis are brought out in our study of the sustainability of the industries created. In Chapter 7 we probe the leverage strategies more generally, examining their strengths and limits to their applicability, and the potential pitfalls involved in using them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-1980s, when the US and Japan were struggling for world supremacy in semiconductors, and Korea and Taiwan were making their first moves into the industry, the South East Asian countries Singapore and Malaysia were following a quite different trajectory. Lacking anything like the technological sophistication of their North East Asian neighbours, these countries sought to leverage themselves up the technology ladder by attracting investments from multinational corporations (MNCs) – and indeed had some success in this endeavour, particularly in semiconductor packaging and assembly, and electronics. But the strategy these countries had been pursuing appeared to unravel in the mid-1980s. Impressive as their industrial output was, it was produced by multinationals rather than by domestic firms – and the activities were decidedly at the low-technology end of the spectrum. Then amidst a worldwide electronics industry recession, the multinationals cut back investments in both Singapore and Malaysia, underlining the vulnerability of the countries. With high wages being advocated by the government in each country as part of a social justice campaign focused on the multinationals, local enterprises found themselves squeezed. It was out of this crisis that new policies and programs were developed which have resulted in a sustained period of growth and industrial upgrading in Singapore and Malaysia, and a breakthrough by both into the most sophisticated ‘front end’ of the semiconductor industry, namely wafer fabrication. The activities are carried out at three dedicated wafer-fabrication industrial parks in Singapore, and at the Kulim high-technology park development in Kedah, northern Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rarely has a technological device so dominated an era. The transistor, only invented in 1947, and then the silicon chip, now feed into a vast array of products and processes, investing them with powers of intelligence that were unthinkable just a few years ago. These tiny slivers of silicon, etched with layers of metal and polymers to spin high-technology webs of unbelievably complex circuitry are the critical technological drivers of our time, creating new products like digital watches, personal computers, high-definition television – and new industries to manufacture them. Integrated circuits (ICs) have grown in complexity so that what started as a single device – the transistor – now encompasses millions of devices embedded in a single piece of silicon. These are the ‘megabit’ chips like dynamic random access memories (DRAMs) which, by the year 2000, are reaching the one-gigabyte level: one chip with a thousand million devices embedded in it. This complexity feeds into a multitude of new uses, blending sound, image, text and data in cunning worldwide webs of multimedia information generation and exchange. New worlds of fantasy are spun out of them, a new world of virtual reality. The world of business that generates wealth from these chips is anything but a ‘virtual’ reality. The wealth generated on the US West Coast in Silicon Valley, where the chips were designed and, to some extent, fabricated, and Hollywood, where the chips are used to conjure dreams, is all too real. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]