Semiconductor manufacturing is still a little bit like magic.  It’s hard to imagine packing millions of transistor into tiny spaces and creating  cellphones, computers, flat screen television, digital cameras, CD players and so forth.  And the industry keeps pumping out the innovations. And there are so many technologies, all focused on solving application problems but […]

One of the mechatronic Top Ten applications has to be the hard disk drive.  Strangely, it is not an application that you hear much about.  That’s probably because unless you work on hard disk drive design, you pretty much take for granted that little black box that stores all your information. So the group that […]

The semiconductor industry is the largest economic segment of the US economy. We still dominate in a few areas. Semiconductor equipment, hard disk drives, computers as finished products, laser printers and inkjets are some of the product areas where American companies continue to dominate. And a lot of the innovation that drives technology originates in […]

When you consider the technical issues of making semiconductors, it seems impossibly difficult. Semiconductor fabrication requires lithographic processes to create features that are measured fractions of an Angstrom, the unit of measure of wavelengths of light. Pretty small. The least contamination or vibration that isn’t supposed to be there can ruin parts. Wafer polishing machines […]

It used to be said that what’s good for Detroit is good for America.  This idiom referred to the dominant role of the automotive manufacturing in the American economy.  During the boom of the 1950’s and 60’s many controls companies grew into their current positions as dominant controls suppliers by developing ever more powerful solutions […]