SCIENCE

A wealth of information on recent advances in semiconductor research is now available for free, thanks to an agreement between the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the American Institute of Physics (AIP). The development should be welcome news to semiconductor chip manufacturers, universities and others in the computer industry who will find it less expensive to explore changes in critical measurements for semiconductor technology.

Proceedings that have been available through paid subscription or compendium volumes, such as this one from the conference's first year, are now available online at no charge. Credit: AIP

The two institutions have made the proceedings from the International Conference on Frontiers of Characterization and Metrology for Nanoelectronics (formerly Characterization and Metrology for ULSI Technology) available for free download from both their Web sites. Until now, papers presented at the NIST-led conference series, which began in 1995, were only available through paid subscriptions.

NIST's David Seiler says the proceedings' availability should greatly help employees in the fast-paced semiconductor industry get up to speed on unfamiliar measurement and characterization issues. In addition, they can learn about new techniques and equipment being introduced to characterize semiconductors.  

"These collected proceedings represent research and overviews of critical topics collected from worldwide experts in the field of semiconductor characterization and metrology," says Seiler. "As there is frequent turnover in the industry, there is constant need for training and retraining of employees. Improved access to this background will ease that process dramatically."  

On the NIST Web site, the archived proceedings publications, up to and including the 2009 conference (along with slides from most of the conference invited talks), are available atwww.nist.gov/pml/semiconductor/conference/archives.cfm. The AIP has made the archived proceedings publications available at http://proceedings.aip.org/semiconductor_metrology. Documents are available in searchable PDF form.

The eighth conference in the series was held last week (May 23-26, 2011) at the MINATEC Campus in Grenoble, France. Proceedings from this conference will be available online in the near future. Information about AIP is available at www.aip.org/aip.