With Infineon Technologies AG at the helm as project coordinator, a total of 17 companies and research institutes in the semiconductor and automotive sectors are collaborating on a project to develop methods for integrating capacitors on silicon chips. By doing so, the participants hope to reduce the number of discrete capacitors currently mounted on PCBs by as much as 30%. The project, called materials for next generation capacitors and memories, MaxCaps for short, will continue through August 2011. Project partners are looking for alternatives to the silicon dioxide and silicon nitride materials currently used as dielectrics in chip manufacturing. MaxCaps targets the development of new isolating materials with a high dielectric constant of at least 50 and the associated deposition processes. For more info, visit
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