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www.us-tech.com


October, 2022


MIRTEC Supplies Cutting-Edge 3D AOI to CIC


Continued from page 6


with an average longevity within the company of more than 13 years. CIC’s longstanding repu- tation is proven through its cus- tomer longevity, which averages more than 12 years. Maduri adds that MIRTEC


has been an ideal partner for the past 17 years and that CIC appre- ciates the outstanding service and responsive technical support. “MIRTEC’s AOI equipment is al- ways at the cutting-edge of tech- nology,” he concludes. “With the way MIRTEC is keeping up with


state-of-the-art technology, CIC expects to keep our long-term partnership going. MIRTEC is considered a valuable partner and an extension of our company. Contact: CIC, 33 Rossotto


Drive, Hamden, CT 06514 % 203-288-5605 E-mail: kmaduri@cicems.com Web: www.cicems.com and MIRTEC Corp., 3 Morse Road, Oxford, CT 06478 % 203-881-5559 Web: www.mirtecusa.com r


See MIRTEC at SMTAI, Booth 906


Silicon Image Sensor that Computes


Continued from page 1


— known as complementary met- al-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors — that are used in nearly all commercial devices that need capture visual infor- mation, including smartphones. “Our work can harness the


mainstream semiconductor elec- tronics industry to rapidly bring in-sensor computing to a wide variety of real-world applica- tions,” says Donhee Ham, the Gordon McKay professor of elec- trical engineering and applied physics at SEAS. Ham and his team devel-


oped a silicon photodiode array. Commercially-available image sensing chips also have a silicon photodiode array to capture im- ages, but the team’s photodiodes are electrostatically doped, meaning that sensitivity of indi-


vidual photodiodes, or pixels, to incoming light can be tuned by voltages. An array that connects multiple voltage-tunable photo- diodes together can perform an analog version of multiplication and addition operations central to many image processing pipelines, extracting the relevant visual information as soon as the image is captured. The silicon photodiode array


can be programmed into differ- ent image filters to remove un- necessary details or noise for various applications. An imaging system in an autonomous vehi- cle, for example, may call for a high-pass filter to track lane markings, while other applica- tions may call for a filter that blurs for noise reduction. Web: www.harvard.edu r


Modified Microwave Oven Cooks Up Semiconductors


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gether and then heated, among other steps, in order to produce a desired electrical current. For in- stance, phosphorus is added to silicon and then the mixture is annealed, or heated, to position the phosphorus atoms into the correct place so that they are ac- tive in current conduction. But as microchips continue to


R&D  Prototyping  Production


shrink, the silicon must be doped, or mixed, with higher concentra- tions of phosphorus to produce the desired current. Semiconductor manufacturers are now approach- ing a critical limit in which heat- ing the highly doped materials us- ing traditional methods no longer produces consistently functional semiconductors. Hwang’s modified microwave


oven overcomes this challenge by using microwaves to activate the excess dopants. Just like with household microwave ovens that sometimes heat food unevenly,


previous microwave annealers produced “standing waves” that prevented consistent dopant acti- vation, but Hwang’s prototype se- lectively controls where the stand- ing waves occur. Such precision allows for the proper activation of the dopants without excessive heating or damage of the silicon crystal. The breakthrough could


change the geometry of transis- tors used in microchips. For more than 20 years, transistors have been made to stand up like dorsal fins so that more can be packed on each microchip, but manufacturers have recently be- gun to experiment with a new ar- chitecture in which nanosheets are stacked vertically that can further increase the density and control of transistors. The exces- sively doped materials enabled by microwave annealing would be key to the new architecture. Web: www.cornell.edu r


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