Carbone Lorraine Acquires Calcarb in Solar Push
Carbone Lorraine has acquired Calcarb, a manufacturer of rigid graphite felt used as insulation in high-temperature furnaces used by the semiconductor and solar industries.
Elpida in Talks With Taiwan DRAM Makers
Japan’s Elpida Memory is discussing a possible four-way merger that would combine it with Taiwan’s Powerchip, ProMOS and the Rexchip Electronics joint venture. The talks come shortly after separate refinancing deals were arranged for Hynix Semiconductor in South Korea and Qimonda in Germany. Qimonda is betting on a new stacked capacitor DRAM design that was described at the recent IEDM conference.
Flash Vendors Facing Scaling Challenges
Toshiba engineers said at the recent IEDM that they have improved on the SONOS flash structure, creating a double-tunnel oxide structure that can extend flash to the 10 nm generation. Also at IEDM, flash pioneer Stefan Lai said he believes phase-change memories have the best chance to replace today’s floating gate memories. Lai said he “made a bad call” while at Intel in the late 1980s, rejecting NAND flash as unreliable.