Critics of US policy on semiconductor manufacturing exports to China complain that the policy impedes sales by US companies without having a noticeable impact on China's access to manufacturing technology. A new report from the General Accounting Office agrees that a reassessment is long overdue. (PDF file. Adobe Acrobat Reader required.)
How big is the MEMS market? No one seems to know, but Steven Walsh offers a good overview at the SEMI site.
The US International Trade Administration's Microelectronics page is full of useful statistics, plus information about import tariffs, trade policy, and more.
Polishing slurries, advanced resists, and low-k dielectrics place more pressure on advanced materials suppliers. SEMI's Microelectronic Materials Strategy Symposium (M2S2) looked at the opportunities, and risks, in this increasingly important sector.
VLSI Research's annual 10 Best survey ranks semiconductor manufacturing equipment suppliers based on equipment performance and customer service.

Directories and databases

The Delphion patent server offers free searches of US Patents, with moderately priced pay-as-you-go and subscription packages for downloads and international searches.
SEMI's page includes a directory of SEMI members, registration information for upcoming events, and much more.

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History of technology

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has a huge Chip Collection, much of which is online. Lots and lots of photos, ranging from Texas Instruments lab notebooks to construction analyses by ICE.
The Nobel Prizes celebrate their centennial in 2001. Online, the Nobel e-Museum includes information about current and past laureates, the history of the prizes, and more.
PBS surveys the history of the transistor, from the discovery of the electron to Intel's Pentium processors. Aimed at non-experts, with plenty of illustrations and interesting quotes.

Innovation

Who are the entrepreneurs? A new study from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation takes one of the first in-depth looks at the earliest stages of new business formation, before even magazines like Inc. are paying attention.
Congratulations to EE Times on 30 years of outstanding technology coverage. The magazine's special anniversary issue, "The Art of Change," looks at possible disruptive technologies for the next 30 years. The individual articles are all excellent. Highly recommended.
The Lemelson-MIT Awards include the world's largest prize for innovation and invention. The Awards' site is overflowing with resources for inventors, from a comprehensive collection of links to an intellectual property handbook.

Interesting images

What do integrated circuits look like? IBM's Microelectronics Gallery is full of images at many different scales, from the manufacturing fab down to individual transistors. An annoying pseudo-museum interface makes finding specific images difficult, especially for low-bandwidth users.
Many scientists trace their interest to their first look through a microscope. The Boston Museum of Science's SEM page opens the magical world of the very small to anyone with a browser.

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Lighter side

MIT can be a serious place, with lots of people working very hard. The IHTFP Hack Gallery commemorates somewhat less serious moments. And no, the page has nothing to do with breaking into computers.
Are you taking your work too seriously? Ted Goff's business and safety cartoons poke gentle fun at corporate life.
There's more on those chips than transistors! The Silicon Zoo reveals the exotic fauna and other doodles hiding in the margins of IC designs.

Management

What's it like to design a leading edge IC? SiliconValley.com has a seven-part series on Bay Microsystems' quest for a 10-Gbit network processor.
Does your company have an emergency management plan? This Federal Emergency Management Agency guide can help you create one.
A recent article in Compound Semiconductor discusses the need for automation and standardization in photonics manufacturing.
Telework is one of the most dramatic examples of technology-driven workplace change. Last year's US Department of Labor symposium on telework is one of the few systematic studies of the phenomenon.
For the last ten years, UC Berkeley's Competitive Semiconductor Manufacturing program has studied the technology, management, and business practices that set the world's best semiconductor plants apart.

Manufacturing reference

For ASML's Analyst Day 2003, the company put together a good series of overviews of their lithography technology and roadmap. Of general interest, despite the pro-ASML bias.
From EETimes, a special supplement on the future of semiconductors. The discussion of the limits of CMOS is especially noteworthy.
Cyberfab.net bills itself as an "Accelerator for Semiconductor Innovation." I don't know about that, but the site does have a plethora of resources for fab managers and anyone else trying to run an efficient semiconductor process.
Much of the content on corporate sites is either sanitized marketing speak or highly specific product information. Still, a few gems are hidden in the mud. IBM's Blue Logic Showcase is an accessible introduction to advanced chip manufacturing.
More than 20 years after it was developed, atomic layer deposition is gradually finding production applications. Semiconductor International offers a useful overview of the technology.
As resolution enhancement technologies complicate mask making, the relationship between reticle and wafer CD variation becomes critical to CD control. In the September 2001 edition of Nikkei Electronics Asia, KLA-Tencor's Moshe Preil discusses reticle qualification.
Java-based lithography simulation tools at UC Berkeley can simulate scenarios ranging from basic projection lithography to phase shift mask edge effects.
Manufacturing equipment generates vast amounts of trace data, so much that it usually seems like too much trouble to dig through it all. Jon Goldman offers some compelling reasons why the effort is worthwhile.
Sematech recently published a set of updated e-diagnostics guidelines, together with a guidebook for e-diagnostics implementation.
The Intelligent Micromachine Initiative at Sandia National Laboratories has a large image and video gallery, but also good overviews of MEMS technology and devices.
The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors projects the semiconductor industry's challenges and technology requirements for the next 15 years.

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Miscellaneous

MIT's OpenCourseWare project puts complete course materials online, for free. All Institute departments are represented, including Materials Science, Electrical Engineering, and Management.
Drawing on sources from Boston to Sydney, Arts and Letters Daily tries to be the site of record for the intellectual set. It mostly succeeds, with an intimidatingly huge range of news and commentary.
The American Red Cross is accepting both financial and blood donations to help victims of September's terrorist attacks.

News

AsiaBizTech, the online version of Nikkei Electronics Asia, offers market and technology news for the electronics industry. The site's emphasis on Japan and the Asia-Pacific region gives it a different perspective from US-based media.
Yahoo's Semiconductor Full Coverage page is a good index to integrated circuit web sites, from low level tutorials to current news.

Science reference

Scientific American has an interesting nanotechnology "channel," collecting all the magazine's coverage of the subject in one place. A good place to start if you're wondering what all the hype is about.
The University of Reading has a nice reference page on optical properties of various materials. Even better, the page discusses the theory of absorption, reflection, and other optical properties.
Semiconductor industry jargon can be intimidating to the uninitiated, with unpronounceable acronyms flying in all directions. Intersil's Lexicon navigates through the alphabet soup.
Organic electronics promise flexible, low cost circuits for displays and other disposable applications. Earlier this year, the IBM Journal of R&D devoted an issue to these emerging materials.
The Los Alamos National Laboratory e-print archive proves that scientific collaboration remains one of the most important uses of the Web. The archive emphasizes physics and mathematics topics.
The Chemicool online periodic table has been around for a while, but remains the best online source for elemental data.
Physical Reference Data from NIST is a handy source for fundamental physical constants.

Semiconductor devices

Though heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs) have achieved commercial viability, information about HBT device processing and modeling is scattered throughout the technical literature. Anssi Hovinen provides a comprehensive reference in his doctoral thesis for the Helsinki University of Technology.
A recent article in Nikkei Electronics Asia discusses the most common MEMS applications, with photos of many of them.

Web design

The web is full of free (or cheap) software packages for site owners. Many of these are the next step up from the free offsite services that also proliferate on the web. Movable Type, for instance, gives the site owner more control than Blogger and other weblog hosting services.
Online journals (also known as weblogs, or blogs) are everywhere, with content ranging from sublime to ridiculous. Blogger.com helped create the form, with free tools that anyone can use.
Jakob Nielsen's work on web usability has heavily influenced the design of this site.
The CGI Resource Index has a wide range of freeware and shareware scripts to make web sites jump through hoops, including several scripts used on this site.