news review
Intel invests over $40m to push innovation
INTEL is to invest more than $40 million over the next five years in a worldwide network of university research communities known as Intel Collaborative Research Institutes” (ICRI).
The ICRI program is based on the U.S.-based Intel Science and Technology Centres (ISTCs), and will bring together experts from
academia and industry to help explore and invent in the next generation of semiconductor technologies.
“The new Intel Collaborative Research Institute program underscores our commitment to establishing and funding collaborative university research to fuel global innovation in key areas and help address some of today’s most challenging problems,” says Justin Rattner, chief technology officer at Intel.
“Forming a multidisciplinary community of Intel, faculty and graduate student researchers from around the world will lead to fundamental breakthroughs in some of the most difficult and vexing areas of computing technology,” he adds.
The three ICRIs will collaborate with their own multi-university communities and other ICRIs, as well as the U.S.-based ISTCs.
Two previously established centres are being incorporated into the ICRI program. These are the Intel Visual Computing Institute (Saarland University) and the Intel- NTU Connected Context Computing Centre (National Taiwan University).
Each institute will specialise in a particular area and use its research to focus on the unique environments within its region, country and area of research.
The three new ICRIs include the ICRI for Sustainable Connected Cities based in the United Kingdom. This joint collaboration between Intel, Imperial College London and University College London aims to address challenging social, economic and
environmental problems of city life with computing technology. Using London as a test bed, the scientists will explore technologies to make cities more aware and adaptive by harnessing real-time user and city infrastructure data.
Through a city urban cloud platform, the city managers could perform real-time city optimisations such as predicting the effects of extreme weather events on the city’s water and energy supplies. This is expected to result in the delivery of near- real-time information to citizens through citywide displays and mobile applications.
One of the other collaborators is the ICRI for Secure Computing, Germany. At this Institute, Intel and the Technische Universität Darmstadt will explore ways to advance the trustworthiness of mobile and embedded devices and ecosystems.
In the development of secure, car-to- device communications for added driver safety, using new approaches to secure mobile commerce, and a better understanding of privacy and its various implementations. By grounding the research in the needs of future users, the institute will then research software and hardware to enable robust systems suited to these applications.
The final institute, the ICRI for Computational Intelligence is based in Israel. It is a partnership between the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The ICRI will explore ways to enable computing systems to augment human capabilities in a wide array of complex tasks.
Large assembly and test facility select Rudolph to meet
demand Rudolph Technologies, Inc., has announced that a large OSAT (outsourced semiconductor assembly and test) company has placed orders for 14 NSX Series 320 Inspection Systems. The NSX Systems, scheduled for Q2 2012 installation, will be used for inspection in multiple steps during wafer-level chip-scale packaging (WLCSP) processes.
Nathan Little, vice president and general manager of Rudolph’s Inspection Business, stated, “As confirmed by our strong order book for this new tool, packaging and test houses want to take advantage of the latest-generation inspection equipment to maximize throughput and productivity.
The NSX320 System performs defect inspection, 2D bump metrology and acquires on-the-fly defect images for maximum productivity and flexibility. In addition, WLCSP requires flexibility for handling substrates in a variety of formats while collecting detailed defect and 2D metrology information during the inspection process; the NSX320 System incorporates whole wafer and film frame handling solutions to address this requirement.”
The NSX320 System was selected after a competitive evaluation for its high speed and efficient, easy-to-use operating procedures, which delivered the highest productivity and lowest cost-of-ownership of all the tools considered.
“This order is evidence of the leading position the NSX320 Inspection System has established in the rapidly growing market for back-end inspection,” Little added. “Rudolph’s R&D investments in technology-leading products and the history we have with our back-end customers give us the ability to respond to the changing requirements in this important market segment.”
Issue 2 2012
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