Yearly Archives: 2017

IC Insights has revised its outlook for semiconductor industry capital spending and will present its new findings in the November Update to The McClean Report 2017, which will be released at the end of this month.  IC Insights’ latest forecast now shows semiconductor industry capital spending climbing 35% this year to $90.8 billion.

After spending $11.3 billion in semiconductor capex last year, Samsung announced that its 2017 outlays for the semiconductor group are expected to more than double to $26 billion.  Bill McClean, president of IC Insights stated, “In my 37 years of tracking the semiconductor industry, I have never seen such an aggressive ramp of semiconductor capital expenditures.  The sheer magnitude of Samsung’s spending this year is unprecedented in the history of the semiconductor industry!”

Figure 1 shows Samsung’s capital spending outlays for its semiconductor group since 2010, the first year the company spent more than $10 billion in capex for the semiconductor segment.  After spending $11.3 billion in 2016, the jump in capex expected for this year is simply amazing.

To illustrate how forceful its spending plans are, IC Insights anticipates that Samsung’s semiconductor capex of $8.6 billion in 4Q17 will represent 33% of the $26.2 billion in total semiconductor industry capital spending for this quarter.  Meanwhile, the company is expected to account for about 16% of worldwide semiconductor sales in 4Q17.

IC Insights estimates that Samsung’s $26 billion in semiconductor outlays this year will be segmented as follows:

3D NAND flash: $14 billion (including an enormous ramp in capacity at its Pyeongtaek fab)

DRAM: $7 billion (for process migration and additional capacity to make up for capacity loss due to migration)

Foundry/Other: $5 billion (for ramping up 10nm process capacity)

annual samsung capex

IC Insights believes that Samsung’s massive spending outlays this year will have repercussions far into the future. One of the effects likely to occur is a period of overcapacity in the 3D NAND flash market. This overcapacity situation will not only be due to Samsung’s huge spending for 3D NAND flash, but also to its competitors in this market segment (e.g., SK Hynix, Micron, Toshiba, Intel, etc.) responding to the company’s spending surge.  At some point, Samsung’s competitors will need to ramp up their capacity or loose market share.

Samsung’s current spending spree is also expected to just about kill any hopes that Chinese companies may have of becoming significant players in the 3D NAND flash or DRAM markets.  As our clients have been aware of for some time, IC Insights has been extremely skeptical about the ability of new Chinese startups to compete with Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron with regards to 3D NAND and DRAM technology.  This year’s level of spending by Samsung just about guarantees that without some type of joint venture with a large existing memory suppler, new Chinese memory startups stand little chance of competing on the same level as today’s leading suppliers.

Gigaphoton Inc., a manufacturer of light sources used in semiconductor lithography, announced its intention to draw up a new roadmap with the aim of improving the availability of the equipment, and also to respond to the needs of the semiconductor chip manufacturers who are being confronted with increasingly high demands.

Gigaphoton recently drew up a roadmap titled “RAM Enhancement” to enhance the Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability of the Excimer laser, a DUV light source. The company has already started off on overcoming the “99.8%-availability” barrier by 2020, which is the threshold limit value in the industry.

The availability of lithography tools is a key parameter which has a major impact on manufacturing IC chips. In line with this, maximizing the availability requires “long-term stable operation” and “minimized maintenance time.” To achieve both of the above, Gigaphoton is now striving to extend module lifetime and improve on-site unit serviceability that the company’s field engineers provide to customers, aiming at maintenance with the minimum number of machine stops.

To achieve “long-term stable operation,” the company is now increasing each lifetime of major modules such as the chamber (AMP CH), the line narrow module (LNM), and the monitor module (MM) up to 120 Bpls. As for “minimized maintenance time,” new software which automatically calculates expected unit lifetime and the right time for maintenance is ready to be introduced.

With these efforts, the company are now in the course of reducing the required number of maintenance down to only once per year as well as the mean time between module replacement down to half the conventional hours, and also overcoming the barrier of 99.8%-availability on every customer site by 2020. (This is on the assumption that memory chip makers use 60Bpls/year.)

Katsumi Uranaka, President & CEO of Gigaphoton commented, “Along with the increasing demand for semiconductor chips in recent years, the availability of semiconductor manufacturing equipment is becoming increasingly important. The ‘RAM Enhancement’ roadmap which we are promoting was formulated in order to meet these customer needs. From now on as well, Gigaphoton will continue to provide the optimum solutions, while taking into consideration the demands of our customers and also the market trends. ”

SUNY Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Poly) is hosting the 11th IEEE Nanotechnology Symposium at its world-class Albany NanoTech Complex on Wednesday, November 15, from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., with support from sponsors IEEE and the Electron Devices Society, as well as from donors IBM and GlobalFoundries.

The symposium will feature keynotes and presentations on topics from computational health, silicon photonics, spintronics, and packaging to advances in quantum computing devices and architecture. In addition, a number of technical leaders will be recognized with awards for their contributions toward the introduction of copper (Cu) interconnects to the semiconductor industry, including Dr. Dan Edelstein, IBM Fellow and one of the pioneers of this advancement.

In addition to the award recipients from IBM and GlobalFoundries, guests of honor include:

  • Mukesh Khare (Vice President, Semiconductor Technology Research, IBM);
  • Bahgat Sammakia (Interim President, SUNY Poly);
  • T.C. Chen (Vice President Science & Technology, IBM Fellow, IBM);
  • Bijan Davari (Vice President, Next Generation Computing Systems and Technology, IBM Fellow, IBM);
  • George Gomba (Vice President, Technology Research, GLOBALFOUNDRIES);
  • Thomas N. Theis (Executive Director, Columbia Nano Initiative, Columbia University); and
  • Kang-ill Seo (Vice President, R & D, Samsung Semiconductor Inc.).

A link to more information about the symposium, as well as an agenda, can be found here: http://albanynanotechnology.org/

Leti, a research institute of CEA Tech and coordinator of the pan-European consortium FED4SAE, today announced that the 14 project partners have launched a three-year European Commission program to facilitate the acceleration of European cyber-physical-system (CPS) solutions to market. This project will boost digitization of European industry by strengthening companies’ competitiveness in the CPS market.

Cyber-physical systems link the physical world (e.g., through sensors or actuators) with the virtual world of information processing. They are comprised of diverse constituent parts that function together to create some global behavior. These constituents may include software systems, communications technology, and sensors/actuators that interact with the real world, often including embedded technologies.

The FED4SAE project, launched in September in Grenoble, will create a pan-European network of Digital Innovation Hubs (DIH) by leveraging existing regional tech or businesses ecosystems across complete value chains and multiple competencies. The network of DIHs will enable startups, SMEs and midcap companies in all sectors to build and create new digital products, smart applications and services. The project mission also includes innovation management – linking these companies to suppliers and investors to create innovative CPS solutions and accelerate their development and industrialization.

“FED4SAE will give birth to a competitive ecosystem that will help European startups, SMEs and midcaps innovate and thrive as they access leading technology sources, competencies and industrial platforms,” said Leti project coordinator, Isabelle Dor. “The network will also effectively link them to well-connected business infrastructures, such as banks, investors and business accelerators, and existing regional innovation hubs.

“Bottom line: the expanded adoption of CPS solutions offered by the network is expected to lead to quantifiable increases in the participating companies’ market share, productivity and industrial capacities,” Dor said.

The FED4SAE project will fund industrial projects thanks to the cascade-funding process set by the European Commission. There will be three open calls over the course of the project. The first call, which opens Nov. 14, will support the best projects based on their innovation potential and technical expertise, the maturity of the solution, with technology-readiness levels between 3 and 6, and their efficient management of the innovation to create a lasting impact with the developed solution.

This pan-European network will enable companies to use CPS platforms combined with expertise and knowhow from the R&D advanced platforms. The ultimate goal of each industrial project within FED4SAE is to develop a complete solution that can get to market and scale.

This includes combining hardware and software components and deploying them in a range of testbeds prior to deployment into the targeted market, as well as support in business modeling and market insights through guidance from conceptual design through market launch. Application experiments will be funded for developing innovative CPS products that will increase the competitiveness of European innovative companies.

Proposals can be submitted from Nov. 14 to Feb. 6, 2018, for the first open call. The expected average funding per applicant is €50,000 with a maximum of €60,000 for one application experiment.

SEMICON Europa 2017 will take place in Munich from 14 to 17 November, co-located with productronica. Consistent with SEMI’s theme “Connect, Collaborate, and Innovate,” co-locating SEMICON Europa with productronica gathers the full span of electronics manufacturing and end-products, creating the largest European electronics platform ever. More than 400 exhibitors will present their products and innovations at SEMICON Europa 2017. Over 40,000 attendees are expected at the co-located events.

After a period of slow growth, Europe’s semiconductor manufacturers are investing in new construction of 300mm fabs in Germany, Italy and France. Four semiconductor and MEMS manufacturers have announced investments in Europe totaling more than $10 billion. Bosch will build a new fab in Dresden; ST Microelectronics is planning two new 300mm fabs in Agrate and Crolles; and GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Infineon plan to expand their production capacity.

“The global industry will invest more than US$100 billion in equipment and materials this year. Forecasts for 2017 also predict that semiconductor manufacturers worldwide will exceed $400 billion in revenue ─ a new record,” says Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI.  “An unprecedented number of new inflections and applications will broadly expand the digital economy and drive increasing silicon content — in areas including IoT, assisted driving in automotive, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, and 5G. Assuming an average 7 percent CAGR, global chip sales could approach $1 trillion by 2030, and equipment and materials spending could similarly grow to nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars.”

The market segments in which European companies hold strong market positions also shape the conference program of SEMICON Europa 2017. More than 250 presentations, 50 conferences and high-caliber discussions provide an overview of current trends. Key issues this year include: materials, semiconductor manufacturing, advanced packaging, MEMS/sensors, power electronics, flexible and printed electronics. The focus is also on important applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), smart manufacturing (“Industry 4.0”), automotive electronics and medical technology.

The Opening Ceremony will include a welcome speech by Ajit Manocha, president and CEO of SEMI,followed by Laith Altimime, president, SEMI Europe, plus four keynotes:

  • Bosch Sensortec: Stefan Finkbeiner, CEO, on how environmental sensing can contribute to a better quality of life in the context of the IoT
  • Rinspeed Inc.: Frank M. Rinderknecht, founder and CEO, on how to create innovative technologies, materials and mobility means of tomorrow
  • SOITEC: Carlos Mazure, CTO, executive VP, on contributions and benefits of engineered substrates solutions and thin-layer transfer technologies, focusing on applications in the smart space
  • TSMC Europe: Maria Marced, president, on opportunities for new business models to apply in the Smart City

On the exhibition show floor, the TechARENA free sessions are a highlight with the SEMI China Innovation and Investment Forum and the INNOVATION VILLAGE.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Fudan Microelectronics Group today announced they have produced a next generation dual interface CPU card, using GF’s 55nm Low Power Extended (55LPx) technology platform. GF’s 55LPx platform has the capability to integrate multiple functions onto a single chip that results in a secure, low power, and cost effective solution uniquely suited for the Chinese bank card market, including financial, social security, transportation, healthcare, and mobile payment applications.

Fudan’s dual interface CPU card, FM1280, supports both contact and contactless modes of communication, and shares a low power CPU that automatically selects the desired interface. The non-contact interface utilizes GF’s readily available and silicon-proven 55LPx RF IP. Fudan’s FM1280 also uses the embedded EEPROM-based on Silicon Storage Technology (SST) SuperFlash® memory technology to ensure user code and data security.

“With the increasing usage of smart bank cards, and in order to maintain our leadership position in this market, a solution with low power consumption was critical,” said Shen Lei, VP of Technology Engineering at Fudan.  “Our FM1280 card offers lower power consumption, enhanced reliability, and uses an advanced process node. GF’s advanced platform, 55LPx, with its low power logic and highly reliable embedded non-volatile memory, is ideal for our next generation bank card offering. Fudan is pleased to continue our long-standing relationship with GF to manufacture our industry leading products.”

The 55nm LPx platform provides a fast path-to-product solution, and includes SST’s SuperFlash® memory technology, which is fully qualified for consumer, industrial and automotive applications. GF’s 55LPx implementation of SuperFlash offers a small bitcell size, very fast read speed, and superior data retention and endurance.

“GF is delighted to expand our relationship with Fudan Microelectronics, who is the acknowledged leader in the Chinese smart card industry,” said Dave Eggleston, vice president of Embedded Memory at GF. “Fudan joins our rapidly growing customer base for GF’s 55LPx platform, which offers a superior combination of low power logic, embedded non-volatile memory and RF IP for the smart card, wearable IoT, industrial MCU and automotive markets.”

GF’s 55LPx-enabled platform is in volume production at the foundry’s 300mm line in Singapore. GF has previously announced that On Semiconductor and Silicon Mobility are currently using GF’s 55LPx platform for wearable IoT and automotive products.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have achieved a breakthrough in manipulating light to render an object, such as an optical chip, invisible.

According to the recent study published in Nature Scientific Reports, the researchers conceived a new method that deflects and scatters light away from a “cloaking” chip surface so it is not detected.

An operational cloaking chip can be an extension of the basic technologies such as radar-absorbing dark paint used on stealth aircraft, local optical camouflage, surface cooling to minimize electromagnetic infrared emissions, or electromagnetic wave scattering.

“These results open the door to new integrated photonic devices, harnessing electromagnetic fields of light at nanoscale for a variety of applications from on-chip optical devices to all-optical processing,” says Dr. Alina Karabchevsky, head of BGU’s Light-on-a-Chip Group and a member of the BGU Unit of Electro-Optical Engineering and the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology. “We showed that it is possible to bend the light around an object located on the cloak on an optical chip. The light does not interact with the object, thus resulting in the object’s invisibility.”

The next step is for researchers to overcome the significant challenge of developing a prototype.

Other group researchers who contributed to the study, Invisibility Cloaking Scheme by Evanescent Fields Distortion on Composite Plasmonic Waveguides with Si Nano-Spacer, include Yakov Galutin, an MSc student and a member of the BGU Electro-Optical Engineering Unit and the Ilse Katz Institute for Nanoscale Science and Technology, and Eran Falek, a student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

With 7% CAGR between 2016 and 2022, the magnetic sensor market should reach almost US$ 2.5 billion in 2022. Driven by the automotive applications and the introduction of the magnetoresistive technologies, it is showing a steady growth. The industry is step by step undergoing a consolidation process. According to Yole Développement (Yole), future mergers and acquisitions are expected to allow companies to ensure their market positioning and penetrate new market segments.

The “More than More” market research and strategy consulting company, proposes today a dedicated technology & market report related to semiconductor magnetic sensors industry: Magnetic Sensors Market & Technologies. Magnetic sensors functions included in this new analysis are switches/latches, position (angle/linear), speed, current and electronic compass. With this new report, Yole’s analysts are offering a comprehensive overview of the magnetic technologies such as Hall Effect, magneto resistive (AMR, GMR and TMR) and others, combined with market data and competitive landscape. Based on its strong knowledge of the semiconductor industry and its technical expertise, Yole’s team investigated the magnetic sensor ecosystem, conducted numerous interviews with leading players and gathered lot of strategic information. This report presents the key driving forces and restraints for each magnetic sensor market and provides accurate market forecasts in dollars, units and number of wafers.

magnetic sensor market

Magnetic sensors is becoming a key enabling technology for the growing automotive and IoT industries, announces the consulting company.

“Automotive market is the 1st magnetic sensors business thanks to a huge number of magnetic sensors per vehicle, as well as the large volume showed by the automotive sector,” said Yann de Charentenay, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole.

Therefore automotive is the biggest magnetic sensor business by far, accounting for more than 50% of the overall market’s US$1.64 billion value in 2016. Today, 20-30 magnetic sensors are used in a traditional ICE car. This could rise to 35 in hybrid cars, which require additional current sensors. Magnetic sensors can be used for position and speed sensing, switching, current sensing, and have the advantage of being contactless and thus very robust. Thus magnetic sensors already contribute significantly to car electrification. This will continue in coming years, in both powertrain and auxiliary brushless motors, and as reliability requirements increase for autonomous cars.

In parallel, Yole’s analysts consider a 2nd market segment including industrial plants, transportation, homes, appliances and consumer electronics. “The market is clearly very fragmented, with smaller volumes and more dedicated products than in automotive, which are thus also higher priced”, details Yann de Charentenay from Yole. But similar trends as in automotive are currently driving the market growth. And the transition to brushless motors and IoT are boosting the market by providing intelligence and connectivity to objects either for ‘industry 4.0’ or for consumer smart homes. “At Yole, we therefore expect this business will have double digit growth, the highest in the magnetic sensor market,” added Yann de Charentenay.

The ‘ecompass’ electronic compass market is stabilizing after several years of shrinkage due to rapid price erosion and smartphone market saturation. Ecompasses that use 3D magnetic sensors equip a majority of smartphones to precisely give pedestrians directions in digital maps, and for a few years have assisted GPS when satellite signals are unavailable. Market growth will come back thanks to new applications such as wearable, robots and drones, but will be moderate compared to other businesses.

The magnetic sensors market evolution is also pushed by a dynamic technology landscape. Indeed, the presence of magnetoresistive technologies, named xMR grows and reinforces the increasing complexity of the technology environment. It includes AMR, GMR, and more recently TMR. Their growth comes at the expense of, or combination with, historical Hall Effect technology.
xMR technologies’ main advantage is better sensitivity and thus they are mainly used for position measurement, especially for precise angles. Most big Hall players have introduced xMR technologies into their product portfolios and intend to grow this business. Yole’s analysis identified: AKM, Infineon Technologies, Allegro Microsystems, Melexis, TDK (especially with the acquisition of Micronas end of 2015), Diodes and Honeywell. According to Yole, xMR technologies will increase their market share from 27% to 33% from 2016 to 2022.

Electrical physicists from Czech Technical University have provided additional evidence that new current sensors introduce errors when assessing current through iron conductors. It’s crucial to correct this flaw in the new sensors so that operators of the electrical grid can correctly respond to threats to the system. The researchers show how a difference in a conductor’s magnetic permeability, the degree of material’s magnetization response in a magnetic field, affects the precision of new sensors. They also provide recommendations for improving sensor accuracy. The results are published this week in AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.

With the addition of new renewable energy sources and smart homes demanding more information, the electrical grid is becoming more complex. Author Pavel Ripka said, “If you have [a] grid at the edge of capacity, you have to be careful to monitor all the transients (power surges).” Surges are overloads or failures to the system, which can be caused by something as simple as a broken power line, or more dramatic events like lightning strikes or geomagnetic storms.

Ripka explained the importance of monitoring electrical currents: “Every day you get a lot of these small events (surges) within a big power grid, and sometimes it is difficult to interpret them. If it is something really serious, you should switch off parts of the grid to prevent catastrophic damage, but if it’s a short transient which will finish fast there is no need to disconnect the grid. It’s a risky business to distinguish between these events, because if you underestimate the danger then parts of the distribution installations can be damaged causing serious blackouts. But if you overestimate and disconnect, it is a problem because connecting these grids back together is quite complicated,” he said.

To address the increasing complexity of the grid and power outage threats, there has been an increase in use of ground current sensors in the past couple of years. New yokeless current sensors are popular because of their low cost and compact size. These sensors are good for assessing currents in nonmagnetic conductors such as copper and aluminum. However, ground conductors are usually iron due to its mechanical strength, and iron has a high magnetic permeability.

Using these new sensors to measure ground currents when iron is present is a bit like using a thermometer to assess if the heating needs to be switched on, not taking into account where exactly the thermometer is placed. Near a door or window, the thermometer’s reading can be affected differently than elsewhere. In the same way, this study has shown that not taking into account the magnetic permeability of a conductor distorts the accuracy of a reading with a yokeless sensor.

Ripka and his team matched experimental measurements with theoretical simulations to highlight the difference in yokeless sensor readings between nonmagnetic and magnetic conductors.

“We can show how to design (yokeless) current sensors so that they are not so susceptible to this type of error,” Ripka said. “[This study is] just a small reminder to make [engineers] design sensors safely.”

To further prove the point, Ripka’s group is starting to take long-term readings at power stations, comparing results to commercial uncalibrated sensors. In the future, Ripka envisions cooperating with geophysicists to correlate ground currents and geomagnetic activity, to better understand how these currents are distributed within the earth and even predict future disruptions to the grid.

Seoul Semiconductor exhibited its new SunLike Series LEDs, the world’s first LED to produce light that closely matches the spectrum of natural sunlight, at the recent Professional Lighting Design Conference (PLDC), held in Paris, France from Nov. 1 – 4. The new LED technology, first unveiled in Frankfurt, Germany in June of this year, is generating interest from many global lighting companies, who are developing new lighting products using SunLike Series LEDs.

New products from leading lighting designers powered by Seoul Semiconductor’s SunLike LED technology were on display at PLDC 2017, which attracted more than 2000 attendees. A number of these companies signaled their intention to launch these new SunLike-powered lighting products in the market.

The director of Seoul Semiconductor’s Lighting Divison, Mr. Yo Cho, was invited as a keynote speaker at the PLDC’s opening event, where he presented SunLike Series LED technology. “Because the SunLike Series LEDs are designed to deliver light that closely matches sunlight’s natural spectrum, they provide an optimized light source that maximizes the benefits of natural light,” said Mr. Cho. “Thus, the colors and texture of objects can be viewed more accurately, as they would be seen under natural sunlight.”

According to Dr. Kibum Nam, head of Seoul Semiconductor R&D Center and Chief Technology Officer, “SunLike Series LEDs have the potential to drive a revolution in lighting – overcoming the limits of artificial light sources by implementing light closer to the natural spectrum of sunlight. Seoul will open a new era of natural spectrum lighting with the launch of more SunLike LED technology.”

SunLike Series natural spectrum LEDs may also play a key role in minimizing the negative effects of artificial lighting. While conventional LED technology produces light with a pronounced blue “spike” in its spectral output, SunLike LEDs implement a more uniform spectrum that more closely matches natural sunlight, lowering this blue light spike. Some recent research indicates that this blue light spike may produce negative effects when viewed for prolonged periods of time during night-time hours, potentially interfering with natural human biorhythms. By employing new light sources powered by SunLike Series LEDs, lighting designers will be able to deliver a healthier light experience.

Interest in the link between light sources and human health is higher than ever before, as evidenced by the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology, Professor Jeffrey C. Hall, University of Maine; Professor Michael Morris Rosbach, Brandeis University; and Professor Michael Young, Rockefeller University. These researchers are credited with seminal discoveries about the cellular mechanisms for circadian biology.