Monthly Archives: June 2013

Multitest, a designer and manufacturer of final test handlers, contactors and load boards used by integrated device manufacturers (IDMs) and final test subcontractors worldwide, today announced that it will hold its annual Open House Week July 9-11, 2013. Daily tours of the Multitest Santa Clara, CA facility, located at 3021 Kenneth Street, will be held at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.

The tours will include live demos of fully installed handling equipment, a factory tour of Multitest’s board fabrication, as well as expert discussions about the company’s innovative test solutions to fully support the opportunities of mobility. Mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and notebooks allow connecting anywhere at any time. Semiconductors for mobile applications need to meet dedicated requirements. Semiconductor design and production implement new approaches. Advanced packaging technologies need to be supported by cost-efficient test solutions.

Multitest’s handling equipment, contactors and load boards fully support the special electrical and mechanical requirements of mobility. Mobility drives new package types, advanced IC functionalities and integration. Multitest offers the ideal test setup to leverage the optimum features from each test cell element, harmonize the elements, and offer a cost-efficient, high-performance solution. For more information or to register for the event, visit http://multitest.com/openhouse

SiOnyx Inc. announced independent validation of its image sensor technology.  The U.S. Army’s premier agency for night vision technology tested the SiOnyx XQE-1310 sensor in its labs and confirmed imaging at 1 mLux (1×10-4 Ft-candles).

"We are very excited about these independent validation test results," said Dr. Martin Pralle, VP of Government Programs for SiOnyx. "1 mLux is a critical threshold in the development of digital night vision."

For the past 60 years, night vision technology was based upon the analog image intensifier tube, a fully integrated system including both sensor and display in a single assembly.  Digital night vision offers the warfighter the ability to separate these two critical components.  This enables a highly flexible system architecture where the imager can be a clip-on module that can move from helmet to weapon sight to rail camera, while the independent heads-up display provides the imagery to the warfighter.

SiOnyx’s XQE sensors enable this capability by digitally capturing nighttime imagery using starlight and the natural ambient night sky illumination known as night glow.  Once in the digital domain, streaming and sharing the video at the unit level or with central command is readily achievable.

All sensors in the XQE family share the benefits of ultra-low read noise for extended low-light imaging and 72dB of native dynamic range.  Additionally, all XQE sensors have on-chip high dynamic range (HDR) features that allow up to 120dB dynamic range.  XQE sensors are fabricated with a standard CMOS process that offers low power, low dark current, and no sensor cooling requirements.

SiOnyx XQE image sensors are being provided on a sample basis in Q2 2013 to customers interested in evaluating the use of XQE image sensors in the next generation of imaging platforms. 

IBM and United Microelectronics Corporation, a global semiconductor foundry, today announced that UMC will join the IBM Technology Development Alliances as a participant in the group’s development of 10nm CMOS process technology.

"Established over a decade ago, the IBM alliance allows the partners to leverage our combined expertise and collaborative research and innovative technology development to address the demanding needs for advanced semiconductor applications," said Gary Patton, VP, IBM Semiconductor Research & Development. "UMC is a strong addition to the alliance."

Po Wen Yen, CEO at UMC, added, "IBM is a recognized leader in fundamental semiconductor technology. We are extremely pleased to work jointly with IBM on advanced fundamentals, and to contribute our many years of experience in developing highly competitive manufacturing technology. Our role as one of the world’s top foundries requires us to introduce leading-edge processes in a timely manner to enable next generation customer chip designs. We look forward to collaborating closely with IBM, leveraging their deep technology expertise to shorten our 10nm and FinFET R&D cycles and create a win-win situation for UMC and our customers."

The agreements between UMC and IBM expand upon their 2012 agreements concerning prior nodes, including 14nm FinFET. With IBM’s support from this collaboration, UMC will continue to improve its internally developed 14nm FinFET to offer industry competitive low-power technology enhancements for mobile computing and communication products. The parties plan to develop baseline 10nm process technology to meet the needs of UMC customers. UMC will send an engineering team to join the 10nm development work that will take place in Albany, New York, while UMC’s 14nm FinFET and 10nm implementation will take place at UMC’s Tainan, Taiwan R&D site.

At this week’s International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW 2013, Snowbird, Utah, June 12-16 2013), imec and Holst Centre presented a large-area fully-organic photodetector array fabricated on a flexible substrate. The imager is sensitive in the wavelength range suitable for x-ray imaging applications.

Because of their very high absorption coefficient, organic semiconductors allow extremely thin active layers (10 to 50 nm). Also, given their low processing temperature, they can be processed on foils. As a result, organic imagers can be more robust and light-weight compared to their traditional counterparts and may be used for conformal coating of randomly shaped substrates. Moreover, the wide variety of organic molecules available ensures that the properties of the active layer can be tuned to applications requiring specific wavelength ranges.

The presented imager is sensitive in the wavelength range between 500 and 600nm, making it compatible with typical scintillators and therefore suitable for x-ray imaging applications. It was fabricated by thermally evaporating an ultrathin (submicron) photosensitive layer of small, organic molecules (SubPc/C60) on top of an organic readout circuit. A semi-transparent top contact enables front-side illumination. The readout backplane was manufactured on six-inch foil-laminated wafers. It consists of pentacene-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) in arrays of 32×32 pixels with varying pitch (1 mm and 200 µm). To prevent degradation of the organic semiconductors in the air, the photodetector array is encapsulated. The imager was characterized under illumination with a calibrated green light-emitting diode (LED), yielding a linearly increasing photocurrent from the incident power of 3 µW/cm2. Dark current density is below 10-6 A/cm2 at a bias voltage of -2V.

organic, flexible imager
Fully-organic, flexible imager developed by imec, Holst Centre and Philips Research

“This latest achievement is a significant step forward in not only finding the optimal materials, but pinpointing the best ways to process materials into reliable organic circuits and systems with state-of-the-art performance,” said Paul Heremans, technology director at the imec/Holst Centre. “Once again, we’re proud to demonstrate how imec’s top-notch research leads to relevant industrial solutions, and subsequently brings added value to our partners’ businesses.”

This research results are presented in collaboration with Philips Research, at the (2013 International Image Sensor Workshop (IISW), sponsored by the International Image Sensor Society (IISS), June 12-16, 2013.

senior vp and general manager of spansionSpansion Inc., a provider of flash memory solutions for embedded markets, today announced the appointment of Robin J. Jigour as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s Flash Memory Business Group.

"Robin brings deep memory product expertise to Spansion and will play an instrumental role in continuing to drive new product innovation with our NOR and NAND Flash memory solutions," said John Kispert, president and CEO of Spansion. "He has a track record of new product development that translates into new market opportunities and revenue growth."

Jigour has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry with companies such as Intel, ICT, Nexcom, ISSI and NexFlash. In the mid-1990s, Jigour pioneered the industry’s first Serial Flash memories, a market segment with annual sales of over $1.3 billion and growing. In the mid-2000s, he defined and introduced the market’s first Multi-I/O (Dual and Quad) Serial Flash memories, setting the standard that is widely used in the industry today. Most recently, Jigour was vice president of Flash Memory marketing at Winbond, where he played a key role in starting the company’s Serial Flash memory business in 2005 and growing it to approximately $370 million in 2012.

"Building upon Spansion’s industry-leading technology brings forth an exciting opportunity to accelerate the use of Flash memory and continue to deliver the solutions our customers need for next-generation, high-performance memory intensive systems," said Robin Jigour. "I am thrilled to join an organization such as Spansion with unparalleled focus and execution in the embedded market."

The global semiconductor foundry United Microelectronics Corporation announced the opening of its UMC Korea office. UMC intends for this office to help expand regional business and provide local support to customers. In its official release, UMC said the proximity of its new office to its Korean customers will create working synergies that will help expedite engagement and support, thus shortening time-to-market for Korea-based customers designing and manufacturing on UMC process technologies.

Steve Wang, vice president in charge of Asia sales division at UMC said, "Korean companies have been deeply involved in the global IC supply chain as high-tech applications become increasingly mobile with more demands on power saving, portability, and performance. We see this as a great opportunity to partner with Korea based IC companies as they can take advantage of UMC’s expertise in power management, display driver, touch panel IC, and leading-edge process technologies as well as our flexible, collaborative foundry working model. We look forward to creating new opportunities with Korea-based customers with the opening of UMC’s new Korea office."

In addition to opening its Korea office, UMC was the first independent foundry to introduce a Korean language website.

A team of researchers from the Nanoengineering Research Centre (CRNE) and the Department of Electronic Engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya · BarcelonaTech (UPC) has found a way to make the manufacture of crystalline silicon materials faster and more affordable. The results of their research have recently been published in the online version of the landmark journal Applied Physics Letters ("’Silicon millefeuille’: From a silicon wafer to multiple thin crystalline films in a single step").

Thin crystalline silicon wafers measuring around 10 µm (micres) are costly but also very sought after in the field of microelectronics, especially in view of the growing demand for 3D circuit integration with microchips. Silicon wafers also have potential photovoltaic applications in the medium term in the conversion of sunlight to electricity and the production of more affordable, more flexible and lighter solar cells.

In recent years, techniques have been developed to obtain increasingly thinner crystalline silicon wafers from monocrystalline cylindrical ingots. Layers cut from the ingots using a multithreaded saw infused with abrasive material have a minimum thickness of around 150 µm. Obtaining wafers that are any thinner is more complicated, as existing methods only allow such wafers to be obtained one at a time. Furthermore, 50 percent of the silicon is lost in the process.

The technology developed by the research team – David Hernández, Trifon Trifonov and Moisés Garín, led by Professor Ramon Alcubilla – enables a large number of crystalline layers, controlled for thickness, to be produced from a single crystalline silicon wafer in just a single step. The outcome is a kind of crystalline silicon “millefeuille” produced more efficiently, more rapidly and more affordably than by existing methods.

The methodology developed by the scientists is based on making small pores in the material and applying a high temperature during the manufacturing process. Multiple separate crystalline silicon wafers are obtained by carefully controlling the pore profiles. Precise control over diameter controls both the number of layers and their thickness. The millefeuille silicon layers are then separated by exfoliation. The resulting number of silicon layers is determined by the thickness of the layers themselves and the initial thickness of the wafer. The CRnE researchers have succeeded in creating up to 10 thin wafers (5-7mm thick) from a single 300 mm thick wafer.

Reduced costs for industry

The demand for thin and ultra-thin crystalline silicon wafers responds to the application possibilities offered by 3D circuit integration of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) with conventional microchips and also to the latest generation of photovoltaic technology. Wafer cutting for solar cell production, for example, has been steadily improving. Thickness has been reduced (350mm in the 1990s to 180mm currently) while efficiency has been enhanced, resulting in reduced manufacturing costs; nonetheless, greater reductions are likely to be difficult to achieve. It has been shown that, despite lesser thickness, the wafers retain a high capacity to absorb solar energy and convert it into electricity.

Road and street lighting is a key driver for LED technology in general lighting. In less than a decade, LED technology has created more turmoil in the lighting industry than anything occurring over the previous century. Every professional agrees that what used to be a conservative, well-controlled market is undergoing a massive change, referred to as “the LED revolution.” Therefore, it’s high time to take a close look at what’s happening and why, since each General Lighting application, be it indoor or outdoor, has its own way of adopting LEDs. Outdoor lighting is no stranger to revolution. In fact, today it’s one of the two most dynamic General Lighting market segments for LED adoption. Within the segment, architectural lighting was the early adopter, but the main driver these days is definitely road and street lighting. Historically the largest outdoor segment, it now offers the best prospects for LED development in professional exterior lighting. Road and street lighting is a very attractive market, with EBIT levels generally between five and 15 percent and steady growth despite the economic downturn.

 “We estimate that LED luminaire revenue will reach $435M in 2013 and peak at $516M by 2016, fuelled by the increased need for energy efficiency. Growth will be driven firstly by tunnel lighting, and then relayed into highway, road, residential and amenity lighting applications starting in 2014”, explains Pars Mukish, Market and technology analyst, LED at Yole Développement. “By 2017, market size should decline because of a decreasing replacement market (due to LED-based systems’ higher lifetime) and also because of LED luminaire’s ASP,” he adds.

Yole’s report presents all road and street lighting applications and associated market metrics within the period 2008-2020 for each application and region, detailing drivers & challenges, key players, associated volume/market size (luminaires installed base, LED luminaire and packaged LED sales), and LED penetration rate.

A new approach to luminaire design requiring new manufacturer competencies

Designing with LED implies major changes for conventional luminaire manufacturers – mostly at the optical, electrical and physical levels. With the move to LED technology, traditional luminaire manufacturers face dramatic organizational changes, such as integrating electronic competencies, upgrading optical competencies, taking ownership of the light source (SSL), and revamping production organization. Consequently, internal revolution is required within luminaire companies in order to take full advantage of the LED boom.

This report analyses the LED value proposition in road and street lighting, detailing: major changes between conventional luminaire and LED luminaire, how LED technology can be applied to road and street lighting (drivers, key decision-making criteria, impacts of LED adoption on the overall industry), associated lighting design requirements, etc.

The path to an outdoor lighting market involves several players which have already embraced major changes

“Compared to other lighting applications (residential, commercial, etc.), the outdoor lighting supply chain involves more associated/parallel industries, such as the pole and bracket industry, the control industry and the cable industry,” explains Christophe Richon, CEO of Lux Fit. As is the case for other lighting applications, these industries must also redesign their products in order to make their business sustainable: smaller-size pole and bracket equivalents due to LED miniaturization, new power supply and control capacities due to LEDs’ higher start current, etc.

At the business chain level, outdoor lighting is also quite unique in terms of involving different player types: end-users and specifiers such as municipalities, lighting designers, installers, etc. With LEDs offering longer lifetime, better energy savings and increased aesthetic potential, each player must adapt its activity to make best use of the technology.

This report presents an overview of the road and street lighting industry’s supply chain and business chain (conventional and LED), detailing: each player’s role, main industrial trends, impact of LED integration, etc. Also, company profiles are provided for eight key LED luminaire manufacturers.

Developing new business models to increase LED’s penetration rate

Around the world, LED adoption in road and street lighting has benefitted from financial incentives to hasten the change. While recession in many economies has led some governments to revise their subsidizing policies, others have maintained them, and other support forms are emerging. However, in many countries, public end-users are now faced with a dilemma: invest in public lighting (mainly because of increasing urbanization and the need to implement energy efficient systems) or reduce spending (less public money available, political pressure, etc.).
As a result, public end-users are turning more and more to new business models that provide energy efficient lighting at reduced initial costs, such as Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) and performance contracts (ESCOs).
This report presents an overview of LED technology drivers, detailing: technology drivers, application drivers and economic drivers.

 

SEMI, the global industry association for companies that supply manufacturing technology and materials to the world’s chip makers, today reported that worldwide semiconductor manufacturing equipment billings reached US$ 7.31 billion in the first quarter of 2013. The billings figure is 8 percent higher than the fourth quarter of 2012 and 32 percent lower than the same quarter a year ago. The data is gathered jointly with the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ) from over 100 global equipment companies that provide data on a monthly basis.

Worldwide semiconductor equipment bookings were $7.78 billion in the first quarter of 2013. The figure is 23 percent lower than the same quarter a year ago and 14 percent higher than the bookings figure for the fourth quarter of 2012.

The quarterly billings data by region in billions of U.S. dollars, quarter-over-quarter growth and year-over-year rates by region are as follows:

The Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS) from SEMI provides comprehensive market data for the global semiconductor equipment market. A subscription includes three reports: the monthly SEMI Book-to-Bill Report, which offers an early perspective of the trends in the equipment market; the monthly Worldwide Semiconductor Equipment Market Statistics (SEMS), a detailed report of semiconductor equipment bookings and billings for seven regions and over 22 market segments; and the SEMI Semiconductor Equipment Consensus Forecast, which provides an outlook for the semiconductor equipment market.

SEMATECH announced today that Applied Seals North America (ASNA) has joined SEMATECH’s Manufacturing Technology Center, which is designed to improve semiconductor equipment manufacturing productivity, yield and cost. 

The Manufacturing Technology Center is working on particle management solutions to reduce the number of particle excursions that are found in vacuum process tools. As a part of this project, fab participants identified chemical vapor deposition (CVD) systems as the largest contributor to the failure rate and shallow trench isolation (STI) gap fill as the most problematic process application within the CVD tool group.

As a member of SEMATECH’s Manufacturing Technology Center, ASNA will collaborate with SEMATECH engineers to reduce the number of particle excursions by identifying seal designs and materials for STI gap fill process tools that are used in both 200 mm and 300 mm semiconductor manufacturing facilities. Additionally, ASNA and SEMATECH will work together to develop and introduce new material solutions that will help to significantly extend the life of the seals and reduce the number of particles that are shed from them.

“We are excited to collaborate with SEMATECH on innovative technology development to help address current and future technology challenges for sealing of vacuum systems,” said Dalia Vernikovsky, CEO of ASNA. “This project will help spearhead initiatives and collaborative efforts to drastically improve sealing performance while significantly decreasing defects that are attributed to seals. As the complexity of the technology increases, innovations in materials, seal design and particle control is essential for successful manufacturing.” 

“Particle excursions are a major cost-of-ownership issue for vacuum tools and there is a technology gap that ASNA can help address to enable fabs to squeeze additional productivity from their very expensive vacuum tools,” said Julian Richards, Manufacturing Technology project manager. “We look forward to working closely with ASNA in a collaborative effort to engineer sealing solutions that reduce the number of down events caused by particle excursions.”