News Briefs

Nanotechnology company Arrowhead Research Corp. of Pasadena, Calif., is working with Duke University in Durham, N.C., and Duke professor and nanotube expert Jie Liu to develop nanotube-based interconnects as a replacement for copper in computer chips. In exchange for exclusive licensing and commercializing rights, Arrowhead is providing approximately $680,000 in funding over the next two years to develop Liu's technology. Arrowhead representatives say that, as consumer demand grows for smaller and faster chips, copper interconnects become more difficult and costly to fabricate, and degrade faster as they get smaller. While copper burns out at 1 million amps per square centimeter, nanotubes can carry up to 1 billion amps in the same space and have substantially lower resistance than copper. The company believes Liu and his research team have a new approach that could enable large-volume manufacturing of nanotube interconnects in future chips. . . . Germany-based Aixtron AG, a provider of deposition equipment to the semiconductor industry, announced that its engineering teams and those of OLED (organic LED) display manufacturer RiTdisplay Corp. of Taiwan have qualified Aixtron's OVPD technology for the manufacture of OLED devices for full-color display applications. The technology has been exclusively licensed to Aixtron from Universal Display Corp. of Ewing, N.J., for equipment manufacture and offers significant advantages over conventional deposition equipment, according to Aixtron. . . . Tower Semiconductor Ltd. of Israel, a pure-play independent specialty wafer foundry, and Taiwan-based Biomorphic Microsystems Corp., a fabless CMOS image sensor design house, announced that Tower has begun manufacturing Biomorphic 2.0- and 1.3- megapixel CMOS image sensors for cell phones. Biomorphic says it has won a contract with one of the five leading global cell phone manufacturers for one of these new products, which responds to the increasing demand for higher image quality on small mobile handsets.