Yearly Archives: 2016

200mm fabs reawakening


July 13, 2016

By David Lammers, Contributing Editor

Buoyed by strong investments in China, 200mm wafer production is seeing a re-awakening, with overall 200mm capacity expected to match its previous 2006 peak level by 2019 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. By 2019, 200mm fab capacity should be close to the previous peak seen in 2006, according to SEMI. Several new 200mm fabs are expected to open in China. (Source: SEMICON West presentation by Christian Dieseldorff).

Figure 1. By 2019, 200mm fab capacity should be close to the previous peak seen in 2006, according to SEMI. Several new 200mm fabs are expected to open in China. (Source: SEMICON West presentation by Christian Dieseldorff).

Speaking at a SEMI/Gartner market symposium at SEMICON West, SEMI senior analyst Christian Dieseldorff said over the next few years “we don’t see 200mm fabs closing, in fact we see new ones beginning operation. To me, that is just amazing.”

The numbers back up the rebound. Excluding LEDs, the installed capacity of 200mm fabs will reach about 5.3 million wafers per month (wspm) in 2018, almost matching the 2007 peak of 5.6 million wspm. As shown in Figure 1, By 2019 as new 200mm fabs start up in China, 200mm wafer production will surge beyond the previous 2007 peak, a surprising achievement for a wafer generation that began more than 25 years ago. Figure 2 shows how capacity, which held steady for years, is now on the increase.

Figure 2. 200mm fab capacity, which remained relatively constant for years, is now increasing.

Figure 2. 200mm fab capacity, which remained relatively constant for years, is now increasing.

Case in point: On the opening day of Semicon West, Beijing Yangdong Micro announced a new OLED 200mm fab that will be opening in the second half of 2018 to make OLED drivers, according to Dieseldorff.

Over the past few years, Japan-based companies have closed 10 200mm fabs, mostly outdated logic facilities, while expanding production of discrete power and analog ICs on 200mm wafers. But with China opening several new 200mm fabs and the expansions of existing 200mm fabs worldwide, SEMI sees an additional 274,000 wafer starts per month of 200mm production over the 2015-2018 period, adding expansions and additional fabs, and subtracting closed facilities.

“One message from our research is that we believe the existing 200mm fabs are full. Companies have done what they can to expand and move tools around, and that is coming to an end,” he said. SEMI reckons that 19 new 200mm fabs have been built since 2010, at least six of them in China.

SEMI’s Christian Dieseldorff.

SEMI’s Christian Dieseldorff.

Dieseldorff touched on a vexing challenge to the 200mm expansion: the availability of 200mm equipment. “People have problems getting 200mm equipment, used and even new. The (200mm) market is not well understood by some companies,” he said. With a shortage of used 200mm equipment likely to continue, the major equipment companies are building new 200mm tools, part of what Dieseldorff described as an “awakening” of 200mm manufacturing.

 

China is serious

Sam Wang, a research vice president at Gartner who focuses on the foundry sector, voiced several concerns related to 200mm production at the SEMI/Gartner symposium. While SMIC (which has a mix of 200mm and 300mm fabs) has seen consistently healthy annual growth, the five second-tier Chinese foundries – — Shanghai Huahong Grace, CSMC, HuaLi, XMC, and ASMC — saw declining revenues year-over-year in 2015. Overall, China-based foundries accounted for just 7.8 percent of total foundry capacity last year, and the overall growth rate by Chinese foundries “is way below the expectations of the Chinese government,” Wang said.

The challenge, he said, is for China’s foundries which rely largely on legacy production to grow revenues in a competitive market. And things are not getting any easier. While production of has shown overall strength in units, Wang cautioned that price pressures are growing for many of the ICs made on 200mm wafers. Fingerprint sensor ICs, for example, have dropped in price by 30 percent recently. Moreover, “the installation of legacy nodes in 300mm fabs by large foundries has caused concern to foundries who depend solely on 200 mm.”

But Wang emphasized China’s determination to expand its semiconductor production. “China is really serious. Believe it,” he said.

New markets, new demand

The smart phone revolution has energized 200mm production, adding to a growing appetite for MEMS sensors, analog, and power ICs. Going forward, the Internet of Things, new medical devices, and flexible and wearable products may drive new demand, speakers said at the symposium.

Jason Marsh, director of technology for the government and industry-backed NextFlex R&D alliance based in San Jose, Calif., said many companies see “real potential” in making products which have “an unobtrusive form factor that doesn’t alter the physical environment.” He cited one application: a monitoring device worn by hospital patients that would reduce the occurrence of bed sores. These types of devices can be made with “comparatively yesteryear (semiconductor) technology” but require new packaging and system-level expertise.

Legacy devices made on 200mm wafers could get a boost from the increasing ability to combine several chips made with different technologies into fan out chip scale packages (FO CSPs). Bill Chen, a senior advisor at ASE Group, showed several examples of FO CSPs which combine legacy ICs with processors made on leading-edge nodes. “When we started this wafer-level development around 2000 we thought it would be a niche. But now about 30 percent of the ICs used in smart phones are in wafer-level CSPs. It just took a lot of time for the market forces to come along.”

More coverage from this year’s SEMICON West can be found here.

By Shannon Davis, Web Editor

“There’s never been a better time to connect” was the theme of John Kern’s keynote address at SEMICON West 2016 Tuesday morning, though it was clear from his speech that connecting – or digitizing – supply chains is not just a good idea, but imperative in the current ever-changing climate of the electronics supply chain.

John Kern, Vice President of Supply Chains, Cisco Systems, speaking at SEMICON West 2016 on Tuesday morning. (Source: SEMI)

John Kern, Senior Vice President of Supply Chains, Cisco Systems, speaking at SEMICON West 2016 on Tuesday morning. (Source: SEMI)

“If you’re not investing in digitization today, it’s going to be very, very difficult for you to remain relevant over the next decade,” Kern urged his audience.

Kern, who is Senior Vice President of Supply Chains at Cisco Systems, came equipped with several compelling case studies from his team’s own experiments, to make the case for why connecting the supply chain is so vital to innovation and profitability.

The first case study that Kern presented showed Cisco’s results from monitoring energy and energy costs in a factory setting. His team deployed a network of thousands of sensors that monitored energy readings of every piece of equipment in one of Cisco’s Malaysian factories, so teams could gather data and analytics on each piece’s performance. This initiative allowed the factory team to make changes in equipment to optimize performance, which resulted in a 12% energy reduction and a 1 million USD cost savings, which amounted to a full return on investment achieved in less than 10 months.

Kern also envisions a path to tens of millions of dollars in capital savings each year with adaptive testing, an initiative that’s currently saving Cisco test engineers man hours and allowing them to return to high value work. Kern said that Cisco was able to leverage analytics capabilities of a software they owned called Auto Test, along with Cisco’s own 10-15 years of test information, to build a test system that is now capable of machine-to-machine learning.

“The tests are becoming adaptive; they’re changing themselves,” said Kern, “and they’re notifying the engineers when they’re making a change.”

In addition to the cost and time savings, Kern believes this also allows for engineers to develop higher quality products.

And these products are also reaching the market faster, thanks to a Cloud-based supplier collaboration platform Cisco is using, that is allowing all of their suppliers to see real-time changes in demand and real-time changes in supply response, eliminating the bull-whip effect in the supply chain.

“We’ve also seen substantial improvement in product lead time,” Kern said. “We’re able to solve issues [with our suppliers] in a much faster way.”

Ultimately, this is where Kern says Cisco and its supply chain is headed: to what he calls supply chain orchestration.

“We’re trying to move this from a big IT project to having literally hundreds of people in our supply chain that are equipped to change the nature of their work every day,” he said. “If they understand the technology, they’re empowered to change the nature of their work.”

“This is the path for breakthrough productivity,” he concluded. “If you’re not investing heavily in these concepts today, it will be hard for you to stay relevant in the next decade.”

Semiconductor manufacturers and their suppliers – both process tool vendors and providers of sub-fab systems – are looking to an open industrial networking methodology, EtherCAT, developed by Beckhoff Automation (Verl, Germany; m.beckhoff.com) to address the increasingly stringent control requirements of emerging high-precision processes.

During SEMICON West, early adopters are promoting EtherCAT as a next-generation real-time Ethernet control solution, with a variety of attributes: it is fast (good for controlling ever-more precise process recipes), open, and extendable to many more nodes than existing networking protocols. Those attributes make EtherCAT attractive to tool makers such as Applied Materials, Lam Research, and Tokyo Electron Ltd., as well as sub-systems suppliers such as Edwards (Crawley, England).

Fab managers increasingly are looking ahead to the availability of predictive maintenance and other data-based productivity approaches, all of which require fast, extendable networks.

EtherCAT is fast enough for near real-time control. Andrew Chambers, a product manager at Edwards, gave the example of a process recipe that requires a change in gas flow, resulting in a deviation in chamber pressure. To maintain good process control the pressure controller must respond to the change in flow as quickly as possible in order not to lose time as the process chamber conditions stabilize. The EtherCAT control architecture can enable the change in flow, and pre-emptively adjust the pressure control, in real time, using a central controller over the EtherCAT network, rather than relying on the devices responding individually to changes in circumstances.

Increasingly, shrinking device geometries and the trend towards “atomic-scale engineering” are putting pressure on the process tools to control all process parameters with high precision in real time. EtherCAT supporters argue that with very short cycle times and response rates, real-time process control becomes realizable, overcoming the problems that arise from serial control and looped-in control, which can introduce delays in the system.

Edwards’ Gerald Shelley said as tool vendors seek to improve processes, they may need to reduce individual process steps to less than one second. That in turn requires a fast network to enable parameter changes at a correspondingly high rate.

Beckhoff Automation developed EtherCAT based on a specific functional principle, they describe it as “processing on the fly,” which supports very short cycle times. EtherCAT’s rapid response times have therefore proved attractive to semiconductor process tool developers, Shelley said.

Flexibility, another key virtue, allows EtherCAT to support more than 65,000 nodes on a network. “It’s extendable. It can be reconfigured. And there is an emerging option where the network itself can provide power to the devices attached to the network, which reduces the cabling requirements to the system,” Chambers said. Pre-existing, conventional fieldbus networks can be added to the EtherCAT network as additional nodes. “If you’ve got a pre-existing system that you want to integrate into something new that has an EtherCAT network, then you can do that,” he also noted.

As an open protocol network, any party can use EtherCAT, which is described in international standards.

“It has the benefit that it doesn’t need any particularly special infrastructure components to make it run. There’s not a special master device. The devices themselves can incorporate the EtherCAT protocol. You can simply plug a device into the network and have it run. That makes it relatively easy to use,” Shelley added.

Toolmakers, such Applied Materials, Lam Research and Tokyo Electron Ltd., currently use a wide variety of tool control systems on their diverse product ranges. EtherCAT is seen as a route towards a common, adaptable control architecture that could support a diversity of process tools on a common platform.

Beckhoff Automation, with about 3,000 employees worldwide, has worked with its business partners to set up the EtherCAT Technology Group to further develop EtherCAT. The technology group currently has 3,810 members, up from just 300 in 2006.

“There will be open standards so that they’re available to all interested parties, but in particular the profiles of the devices which can be added to any EtherCAT network, the profiles which control how devices respond and communicate with a network, are being generated and developed by the supplier working groups, of which Edwards is a member. We, along with a wide range of other sub-system suppliers are developing devices to meet the requirements for installation in EtherCAT networks, to be able to provide the functions and features that are needed by the semiconductor industry,” Shelley said.

In the future, process tool manufacturers will be able to select from a range of devices with similar functionality which will fit on the same network, so it reduces the dependency of toolmakers on specific individual suppliers. This enables process tool makers to develop advanced bespoke control algorithms and address emerging process challenges.

“From a total process control perspective, our view is that as high volume manufacturing moves towards smaller and smaller nodes, introduction of those processes is going to depend on a complete sub-fab process solution per process tool. These solutions will be based on some kind of integrated best-known method that describes how you set up the sub-fab equipment to deliver what the process vendor needs,” Chambers added.

Predictive maintenance, Intelligent devices

Next-generation sub-fab systems will require the ability to analyze data gathered within the system, or within the submodules within the system. The system will be comprised of intelligent devices, all generating data. “The question that we all have to address is how do you turn huge amounts of data into useful information. We believe that the manufacturer of the sub-fab equipment is well placed to turn raw data into useful information, which then can be relayed to the process tool,” Chambers said.

Relaying that information to the process tool is where the EtherCAT network plays an important role. “The sub-fab equipment could be hooked up to the process tool control network as a node on the EtherCAT network, despite the fact that what’s going on within the integrated sub-fab system doesn’t depend on EtherCAT for its functionality,” he said.

The process tool and the sub-fab equipment are able to exchange operational data or information in real time over an EtherCAT network. “That means if things are happening in the process tool that would benefit from a change in what’s happening in the sub-fab, then that data can be shared, and the sub-fab equipment can adapt itself to whatever the process tool is doing at that specific time, with the result that new and more efficient modes of operation are possible across the tool” he added.

“The equipment in the sub-fab will be generating vast amounts of data. Our intent is that the sub-fab equipment itself processes the data to turn it into information, and the kinds of information that we’re talking about is working up predictive maintenance algorithms so you can effectively predict when, for example, a dry pump or abatement system is going to need service attention, with sufficient advance notice that it can be scheduled into the process tools job schedule,” he said.

“The key point is neither a process toolmaker nor a sub-fab equipment supplier is able to do this in isolation. The whole thing becomes an iterative partnership between the tool operator, the OEM, and the sub-fab equipment maker. Going forward, we can see the emergence of process-specific predictive algorithms as a necessary requirement to enable fully cost-effective device manufacturing,” Chambers said.

A major theme at SEMICON West 2016 is Smart Manufacturing, a.k.a. Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT (IIoT). One definition of smart manufacturing, said Tom Salmon, the SEMI vice president of collaborative technology platforms, is the use of production and sensor data with manufacturing technologies to enable adaptability in processing. It encompasses automation, data exchange, and the transfer of product design data and manufacturing state data.

SEMI estimates that by 2020 there will be about a billion IoT devices at work in manufacturing facilities. By 2020, global manufacturers will invest $70 billion in IoT solutions that year, compared with $29 billion in 2015.

Figure 1. What the future may look like for smart manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.

Figure 1. What the future may look like for smart manufacturing in the semiconductor industry.

Currently, these devices are used largely to track factory assets, to consolidate control rooms, and to increase analytics functionality through predictive maintenance. The goal is that product design data and manufacturing state data will travel through the manufacturing process with the product. This requires that data is communicated to product lifecycle systems at the product companies and to service providers simultaneously.

A number of SEMI standards are facilitating this shift, including Equipment Data Acquisition (EDA), to improve and facilitate communication between manufacturer’s data gathering software applications and factory equipment.

SEMI kicked off an advisory council around smart manufacturing, and will coordinate a Smart Manufacturing symposium at SEMICON West on Wednesday, July 14, and again at SEMICON Europa on Oct. 25 in Grenoble, France.

Thomas Sonderman, vice president/GM of Rudolph Technologies’ software business, said the advisory council links the fabless and the equipment OEM supplier communities. One goal, Sonderman said, is “to help understand what’s required to really take on these concepts, and turn them into something that people can use to improve their overall fab efficiency.”

At the Smart Manufacturing Symposium, Sonderman will discuss what he calls traceability: optimizing the supply chain by blending IoT technologies. How information is acquired and used for Big Data predictive analytics and machine learning is one key aspect. “How do you turn data into some kind of actionable intelligence? I think the idea is to get some consensus around what it actually is, and then what’s required to make it successful,” Sonderman said.

Data security is also important. Data that comes out of fabs is of interest to suppliers, the fabless community and IP companies, among others who create a virtual IDM. “How does a Qualcomm get access to their relevant information, and on the other side, how does a company like Tokyo Electron Ltd. (TEL) or Applied Materials or Lam Research get access to that same information so that everybody can make the right decisions and shift the paradigm from reactive to a predictive/proactive approach.

“We need to go from ‘Hey, I have this problem. What caused it? How can I go fix it,’ to ‘What kind of analysis do I need to do to run my business? What kind of business intelligence is required to run the business, and how can I create analytical scenarios so that I can make sure that I have the information relevant to me to make decisions I need to minimize my time to market, and maximize my profitability?’”

In order for smart manufacturing to succeed, companies must be able to build confidence that they can share data securely. (At Wednesday’s symposium, NextNine, an Israeli IT security company, will present its work with TEL, several U.S. security agencies, and others concerned with moving information around securely).

One opportunity, Sonderman said, is to provide information-linking capabilities to 200mm and smaller wafer manufacturers, making RF filters, sensors, and other products.

“They don’t have a lot of the traditional capabilities that you come to expect. The idea is to link their information together but do it in a way where you can adapt it into those older facilities,” he said.

Rather than use a standard SECS/GEM interface, some tool data can be acquired wirelessly.

“There are all types of information that are relevant to the products, and if you think about what goes on a lot in the fabs it is linking what goes on in the product to what’s going on inside the tools. At legacy or non-leading-edge technology fabs, some of this in itself is a challenge,” he said.

Manufacturers also seek to link metrology data, with two different threads of information coming in: one from wafer-level metrology, and another stream of information from the equipment, which collects data each time the wafer crosses that piece of equipment. Also relevant is product information, including processes that can run multiple products. Figure 1 shows how this kind of data may be collected and shared in the future.

“The concept here is that you link these together in threads and then you create what we call the thread synchronization engine, which allows taking all of this relevant information and create a tapestry of data, which is a very pure data set that’s very representative of the combination of all these different factors,” Sonderman said.

The same types of information threads are woven together in the back-end (packaging) operations, where advance analytics are becoming as essential as in front-end processes.

Analytics are multifaceted, involving everything from visualization, data mining, spatial pattern recognition, and virtual metrology information. “Ultimately what I’m doing is trying to create a wafer-level signature and a tool-level signature and combine those together to create some kind of information I can take action on. That’s the actionable Data Now concept,” he said.

The goal is to combine information, separating the signal from the noise, and then analyze the data to ascertain whether or not a given process step or combination of process steps has contributed to yield loss. By drilling down into the shared data, engineers can discover whether a tool or set of tools is causing the problems.

“This is where things get really interesting. First, you have got to link everything together across the supply chain. Then you have to start looking at how do I drill down inside the equipment?” he said.

Large fabs with literally thousands of tools in operation are collecting huge amounts of information, essentially time series-based data. Linking tool information into an analytical combination with wafer-level information (what was going on inside the tool when those wafers were processed) is a powerful way to improve efficiencies. “That’s where this combination of big data analytics and traditional real time FDC is coming together,” Sonderman said.

To make this work, companies need a Big Data architectural environment, which combines structured data (in many cases in an Oracle database) with unstructured data (often text data, such as maintenance logs). Finally, there is a third space, a combination of time series-based data, such as images and spatial patterns.

The challenge, Sonderman said, is to link all the data together, standardizing the data so that it can be matched with various machine-learning algorithms. “From that I can analyze the data and start spitting out useful information that people can take action on,” he said.

To do that, the industry must deal with the security challenge. “There are ways to solve that challenge, but if we don’t solve that as an industry — and it really is an industry challenge — then we’re going to be handcuffed in terms of being able to take this technology to its ultimate realization. I think that’s now become the priority, versus preparing for the next wafer size and all that,” Sonderman said.

SEMI today announced that Jon D. Kemp, president of DuPont Electronics & Communications, and Tadahiro Suhara, president of SCREEN Semiconductor Solutions Co., Ltd., were elected as new directors to the SEMI International Board of Directors in accordance with the association’s by-laws.

Nine current board members were re-elected for a two-year term: Martin Anstice, president and CEO of Lam Research; Kevin T. Crofton, president of SPTS Technologies (an Orbotech company); Mitsunobu (Nobu) Koshiba, representative director and president of JSR Corporation; Yong Han (YH) Lee, chairman of Wonik; Sue Lin, vice chairman of Hermes Epitek Corporation; Tetsuo (Tom) Tsuneishi, chairman of the Board of Tokyo Electron Ltd.; Tien Wu, director and COO of ASE Group; Natsunosuke Yago, president,  representative director, and chairman of Ebara Corporation; and Guoming Zhang, executive VP of Sevenstar Electronics.

Additionally, the SEMI Executive Committee confirmed Yong Han Lee, chairman of Wonik as SEMI chairman, and Tetsuo Tsuneishi, chairman of the Board of Tokyo Electron, Ltd. as SEMI vice-chairman.

The leadership appointments and the elected board members’ tenure become effective at the annual SEMI membership meeting on July 13, during SEMICON West 2016 in San Francisco, California.

“SEMI and its membership are fortunate to have an accomplished, diverse and global board to oversee the association’s strategic direction,” said SEMI president and CEO Denny McGuirk.  “We appreciate our board members’ contributions to the industry, congratulate the re-elected members, and welcome Jon Kemp and Suhara-san, who begin their terms of service as SEMI directors.”

SEMI’s 19 voting directors and 11 emeritus directors represent companies from Europe, China, Japan, Korea, North America, and Taiwan, reflecting the global scope of the association’s activities. SEMI directors are elected by the general membership as voting members of the board and can serve a total of five two-year terms.

MEMS & Sensors Industry Group (MSIG) invites attendees to a special half-day workshop on the convergence of MicroElectroMechanical Systems (MEMS) devices, sensors, flexible substrates and semiconductors in the Internet of Things (IoT) at SEMICON West on July 13, 2016. Speakers will explore the theme “From Collision to Convergence: Co-Creating Solutions in the Semiconductor and MEMS/Sensors Industry” as they address a new and necessary level of collaboration for enabling IoT and other growing applications.

“The supply chain for the IoT is complex, and navigating its dynamic ecosystem requires collaboration among stakeholders,” said Karen Lightman, executive director, MEMS & Sensors Industry Group. “By focusing on pre- and non-competitive challenges, industry players work toward common goals that benefit all — and that are only possible through collaborative effort. Attendees of the MSIG and SEMI joint workshop will get updates on the most pressing challenges to the increased use of MEMS, sensors and semiconductors in IoT applications.”

“Our joint workshop with MSIG at SEMICON West 2016 is a great forum to work together through the key convergence issues as well as to set the agenda for next steps on our shared goals,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “SEMI and MSIG started with a joint survey on MEMS, sensors and semiconductors in early 2015 and immediately found traction among industry players. With its focus on industry realities like consolidation and the extended supply chain, this workshop takes on the key intersections and inflections.”

MSIG Chief Strategy Officer Steve Whalley and SEMI Vice President of Product Management and Business Development Bettina Weiss will co-chair the joint workshop. The agenda features:

  • Keynote: Leveraging M&A in a Converging Semiconductor and MEMS/Sensor IoT World, Greg Mischou, senior partner, Woodside Capital Partners, LLC
  • Panel discussion with panelists from:
    • A.M. Fitzgerald and Associates
    • Electronic System Design Alliance
    • FlexTech
    • Lam Research
    • Woodside Capital Partners
  • Breakout Sessions — breakout groups will report on specific actions that companies can take to address these challenges/opportunities.

MSIG and MSIG member companies will be on the show floor at SEMICON West. Visit MSIG in Booth N4 or visit http://msigevents.org/semicon-west-2016 for a list of MSIG exhibiting member companies and partners.

The MSIG and SEMI joint workshop takes place July 13, 2016 from 1:00-5:00 p.m. at the San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission Street. Pre-registration is required: http://bit.ly/28IOUbK

Leti, a CEA Tech institute, today announced it has developed a new on-chip communications system to improve high-performance computing (HPC) that is faster and more energy efficient than current solutions and is compatible with 3D architectures.​

Leti researchers, working in the frame of IRT Nanoelec, boosted computing power and slashed energy consumption by stacking chips on top of each other in a single enclosure, or by placing the chips side by side on a silicon interposer. The chips, which have progressed from demonstrator to fabrication-ready, exchange data via a new communications network that is part of the network on chip (NoC) called 3D-NoC.

3D-NoC technology has been demonstrated with a homogeneous 3D circuit that is comprised of regular tiles assembled using a 4x4x2 NoC. It also features robust and fault-tolerant asynchronous 3D links, and provides 326 MFlit/s @ 0.66 pJ/bit. It was fabricated in a CMOS 65nm technology using 1,980 TSVs in a Face2Back configuration.

This second generation 3D-NoC technology has been integrated in the INTACT circuit developed in the frame of IRT Nanoelec. The 3D circuit, currently in foundry, combines a series of chiplets fabricated at the FDSOI 28nm node and co-integrated on a 65nm CMOS interposer.  The active interposer embeds several lower-cost functions, such as communication through the NoC and system I/Os, power conversion, design for testability and integrated passive components.

Moreover, the chip requires 20 times less energy for data transmission than chips placed on an electronic circuit board. This new IP is compatible with standard remote direct-memory-access-type software used for data transmission and has likely industrial uses in virtual-server migration applications.

“The steady rise in the number of applications that require high-performance computing creates a demand for new hardware-plus-software communications solutions that improve both performance and energy consumption,” said Denis Dutoit, Leti strategic marketing manager. “This new technology brick makes it possible to transfer data between processors via a network-on-chip delivering more powerful, energy-efficient computing.”

Leti will host its annual workshop during Semicon West on “Sensing your Future with Leti” at 5 p.m., July 12, at the W Hotel.  Registration is here.

Leti scientists will be available at booth #2028 in the South Hall during Semicon West to discuss this announcement and other recent research developments and initiatives.

SEMI projects that the worldwide semiconductor equipment market will be flat this year and will rebound in 2017 according to the mid-year edition of the SEMI Capital Equipment Forecast, released today at the SEMICON West exposition. SEMI forecasts that the total semiconductor equipment market will grow 1 percent in 2016 (reaching $36.9 billion) after contracting 3 percent in 2015. An increase of 11 percent is expected in 2017 for the market to reach $41.1 billion.

The following results are given in terms of market size in billions of U.S. dollars and percentage growth over the prior year:

SEMI® 2016 Mid-Year Equipment Forecast by Market Region

By EQUIPMENT TYPE

year-over-year

year-over-year

2015

2016F

% Change

2017F

% Change
Wafer Processing

28.78

29.33

1.9%

33.09

12.8%
Test

3.33

3.36

0.9%

3.46

3.0%
Assembly & Packaging

2.51

2.39

-5.0%

2.48

4.0%
Other Front End

1.90

1.86

-2.1%

2.05

10.2%

Total 

36.52

36.94

1.1%

41.08

11.2%

 

By REGION year-over-year year-over-year

2015

2016F

% Change

2017F

% Change
China

4.90

6.41

30.8%

7.24

12.9%
Europe

1.95

2.07

6.2%

2.46

18.8%
Japan

5.49

5.08

-7.6%

4.72

-7.0%
Korea

7.46

6.17

-17.3%

7.99

29.5%
North America

5.12

4.62

-9.8%

4.97

7.6%
ROW

1.97

3.13

58.9%

3.68

17.6%
Taiwan

9.63

9.46

-1.8%

10.02

5.9%

Total

36.52

36.94

1.1%

41.08

11.2%

*Totals may not add due to rounding; Source: SEMI, July 2016; Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS)

Equipment spending had a slow start in the beginning of the year and is expected to accelerate in the second half of the year. Spending growth will continue into 2017 driven by foundries, memory (both 3D NAND and DRAM), MPU, Power, and investments in China. Front-end wafer processing equipment is forecast to grow 2 percent in 2016 to total $29.3 billion, up from $28.8 billion in 2015.  The Test equipment segment is expected to total $3.4 billion, essentially flat when compared to last year. Assembly and packaging equipment and Other Front End equipment are forecast to contract this year, falling to $2.4 billion (-5 percent) and $1.9 billion (-2 percent), respectively.

“After a tepid 2015, device manufacturers are beginning to ramp their investments in key industry segments,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “We expect capital spending to improve for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017.”

Taiwan is forecast to continue as the world’s largest spender with $9.5 billion estimated for 2016 and $10.0 billion for 2017. In 2016, China is projected to be the second largest spender at $6.4 billion, followed by Korea at $6.2 billion. For 2017, Taiwan is projected to maintain its leading position while the market in Korea will nudge past the market in China.

In 2016, year-over-year increases are expected to be largest for Rest of World (59 percent), China (31 percent), and Europe (6 percent). Projected year-over-year percentage increases for 2017 are forecast to be largest for Korea (30 percent increase), Europe (19 percent), Rest of World (18 percent) and China (13 percent). Visit www.semi.org/en/MarketInfo for more information.

By Pete Singer, Editor-in-Chief

On Monday, imec – the Leuven Belgium-based research consortium – hosted its annual imec Technology Forum (ITF) USA, a half-day conference at the Marriott Marquis. With the theme ‘Towards the Ultimate System’, imec’s speakers and industrial keynote speakers looked at the co-optimization of design and new technology, and how technology innovation can deliver the right building blocks to build these systems.

Delivering the keynote address at the event was Luc Van den hove, President and CEO of imec. He talked about how the world was in the middle of a decade of digital disruption brought about by integrated circuit innovation. He then provided an outlook of how the industry could continue to stay on the path defined by Moore’s Law by moving to nanowires and the 3rd dimension.

Luc van den hove, president and CEO of imec, tipped his hat to Gordon Moore, showing a short video clip and describing a future where Moore’s Law will live on through 3D integration.

Luc van den hove, president and CEO of imec, tipped his hat to Gordon Moore, showing a short video clip and describing a future where Moore’s Law will live on through 3D integration.

Van den hove noted what he said were obvious example of disruption today: Uber, the world’s largest taxi company that doesn’t own any taxis. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider that doesn’t own any real estate. Facebook, the world’s largest media provider, that doesn’t generate any media content.

“These are just a few examples, but we will see this kind of disruption everywhere, in every market and every segment,” he said. “Companies will have to adapt. They will have to reposition themselves in the value chain and come up with new business models. This is just the beginning.”

What’s made this disruption possible is IC technology and ubiquitous mobile computing. What’s been particularly beneficial over the last 50 years is that, in addition to the increased functionality that comes with scaling, there were advantages of faster operation at lower power. “This combination of effects that occurs simultaneously with scaling has resulted in the phenomenal evolution,” he said.
After a short video clip of Gordon Moore talking about the benefits of microprocessors, Van den hove give a realistic view of the future.

“Today, there is a lot of debate about the continuity of Moore’s Law. Yes, we’re faced with several tradeoffs. It’s getting harder and harder (to scale) and when we scale down our transistors we do not automatically the performance improvement that we used to with previous generations,” he said. “But we are sure there are sufficient solutions out there that will allow us to continue Moore’s legacy for several more decades. I am convinced that scaling will not only continue, it has to continue. If you want to enable the IoT wave, we will have to succeed in extending Moore’s law to generate the required compute power and storage capacity.”

Van den hove added that Moore’s Law is on the verge of morphing. “We will need other techniques in order to realize this complexity increase,” he said. “We will continue 2D scaling. It will evolve from the FinFET that is in mass production today towards horizontal nanowires, towards most likely vertical nanowires. This will bring us to at least the 3nm generation if not one or two generations more. This will keep us busy for the next 10-15 years.”

He stood by his past comments on the production-worth status of EUV. “To enable this, we will need a cost-effective lithography. We absolutely need EUV lithography to make this happen. I’m sure, based on the progress I’ve seen over the last 12 months, that EUV is ready to enter manufacturing. But we have to be realistic. Eventually, 2D scaling will slow down. I’m not saying it’s going to stop. But it’s getting harder and harder and hence it will require more time to transition from one geometry-based node to the next geometry node. We will need other ways to compensate for this gradual slowdown. One of the obvious ways to do so is to start using more extensively the third dimension, as the memory guys have started to do already,” he said.

Van den hove presented a future where devices are stacked on top of one another like Lego blocks. “Once we are using these vertical nanowires, it’s not so difficult to imagine that we may be stacking those transistors on top of each other – stack an n-FET on top of a p-FET and realize an SRAM cell. It’s obvious that such a 3D version of an SRAM cell has a much smaller footprint than its 2D equivalent. Once we can do that, we can even imagine that we may start stacking some of these building blocks on top of each other,” he said.

“It’s more straightforward to imagine that this can be done with a regular structure such as an SRAM design, but also FPGAs are very regular structures. We can even imagine that we could design random logic and design standard cells within the constraints of such a 3D Lego block and build up a logic circuit with these Lego blocks in a 3D fabric,” he continued.

Heterogeneous integration with photonics is also on the drawing board. “We will combine this also with 3D heterogeneous integration where we will be using chip stacking technology with high bandwidth, high density through silicon vias. We can then combine all these layers with 3D stacking and through-silicon vias, integrate all of this on an interposer, which can also be the substrate to integrate these 3D cubes,” he said. “By adding also photonics on such an interposer, we can also realize optical IOs. This is just another rendition of Moore’s Law which will allow more complexity in a smaller form factor.”

By Ed Korcynzski, Sr. Technical Editor

The near-term outlook for semiconductor manufacturing is challenging, with revenues down slightly but equipment spending up a bit, as reported by experts during the SEMI/Gartner Market Symposium held yesterday afternoon. The global economy is facing extreme uncertainty and is still recovering from the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Duncan Meldrum, Chief Economist with Hilltop Economics, explained why the after-shocks of the 2008/2009 global financial crisis combined with current political uncertainties result in a difficult investment environment. Compared to the 1993-2007 era when world real GDP was +3.2%, there are many indicators that the current ~2.3% GDP growth is the ‘new normal.’

“Rolling recessions in different regions have been pulling down global growth,” explained Meldrum. “Before the financial crisis, all the growth rates tended to be together in a coordinated global market. We’re actually seeing potential growth cut in half compared to what it was before the recession. That will create a new speed limit on the global economy, so it’ll be a tougher world than we’re used to.” These are high level macro-economic global investment numbers, but there’s a high correlation between these numbers and semiconductor industry silicon wafer processing in Millions of Square Inches (MSI).

Capital equipment forecast

Bob Johnson, Gartner research vice president, presented the outlook for semiconductor capital equipment, based on Garner’s economic model assumptions:

  • Consumer demand will remain weak,
  • High inventory of chips in all channels,
  • NAND and DRAM in oversupply for the rest of 2016,
  • Demand weakness continues longer term,
  • No new significant demand driver, and
  • Uncertain global economic climate post-Brexit.

Gartner is not bullish on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to provide a next wave of demand. Premium smart-phones are expected to soon saturate global markets, and PC markets see weak consumer demand. In emerging markets, smartphones will take the majority of disposable income, which lowers new PC and tablet purchases by 10% through 2020.

NAND Flash is the long-term bright spot in the industry, with most of the growth driven by solid-state drives (SSD). However short-term oversupply in the second-half of 2016 is expected due to weak end markets, and increased output of planar 3bit/cell products. 3D-NAND represents 19% of the PetaBytes (PB) of total demand in 2016, increasing dramatically to 70% by 2020. SSDs are not just for PCs and mobile devices, but are moving into the enterprise segment and data centers, and 84% of SSDS will use 3D-NAND by 2020.

“3D-NAND manufacturing represents a major shift from litho-centric to etch-centric processing,” reminded Johnson. “The cost structures is still not competitive with 2D-NAND, but there will still be ~300k wafer-starts-per-month in the fourths quarter of 2016. By 2018, 3D-NAND will be half of the total NAND bits produced.” In response to 3D-NAND competition, 2D-NAND suppliers will likely do another shrink using their fully depreciated fabs, which will contribute to short-term oversupply.

Chinese foundry plans

Sam Wong, Gartner research vice president, discussed challenges of the foundry market related to China’s plans to develop domestic IC fab capability that is globally competitive. “Believe that China is really serious this time, with $140B investment,” said Wong. “The SOC capability of China is world-standard.”

For foundry markets in general, with increases in the number of mask layers with successive nodes the selling prices for finished wafers has to continue increasing. Wafer costs for fabless customers buying from foundries are now <$4K for 28nm-node, and <$7K for 14nm-node. TSMC ramped 14nm in one-half-year, and reports unprecedentedly low defects per mask layer to allow them to produce large Apple chips with high yield.

Packaging trends and china

Jim Walker, Gartner vice president of research, presented on “Semiconductor Packaging: the crucial growth component in China’s electronics supply chain.” IC manufacturing is critical to the economic growth and national security of China, and it is part of the ‘made in China 2015’ plan issued by China’s State Council.

China todays has already invested sufficient resources to now have ~1/3 of the global floor-space in Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facilities, while the percent of global revenue taken by Chinese companies is still much less. Since China has updated investment plans earlier this year, both South Korea and Taiwan industry organizations issued public statements of the need for strategic counter-investments. The semiconductor industry production in Taiwan represents ~13% of its total GDP, so China’s investment into this market is seen as a major threat.