Category Archives: Semiconductors

LED lights and monitors, and quality solar panels were born of a revolution in semiconductors that efficiently convert energy to light or vice versa. Now, next-generation semiconducting materials are on the horizon, and in a new study, researchers have uncovered eccentric physics behind their potential to transform lighting technology and photovoltaics yet again.

Comparing the quantum properties of these emerging so-called hybrid semiconductors with those of their established predecessors is about like comparing the Bolshoi Ballet to jumping jacks. Twirling troupes of quantum particles undulate through the emerging materials, creating, with ease, highly desirable optoelectronic (light-electronic) properties, according to a team of physical chemists led by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Laser light in the visible range is processed for use in the testing of quantum properties in materials in Carlos Silva’s lab at Georgia Tech. Credit: Georgia Tech / Rob Felt

These same properties are impractical to achieve in established semiconductors.

The particles moving through these new materials also engage the material itself in the quantum action, akin to dancers enticing the floor to dance with them. The researchers were able to measure patterns in the material caused by the dancing and relate them to the emerging material’s quantum properties and to energy introduced into the material.

These insights could help engineers work productively with the new class of semiconductors.

Unusually flexible semiconductors

The emerging material’s ability to house diverse, eccentric quantum particle movements, analogous to the dancers, is directly related to its unusual flexibility on a molecular level, analogous to the dancefloor that joins in the dances. By contrast, established semiconductors have rigid, straight-laced molecular structures that leave the dancing to quantum particles.

The class of hybrid semiconductors the researchers examined is called halide organic-inorganic perovskite (HOIP), which will be explained in more detail at bottom along with the “hybrid” semiconductor designation, which combines a crystal lattice — common in semiconductors — with a layer of innovatively flexing material.

Beyond their promise of unique radiance and energy-efficiency, HOIPs are easy to produce and apply.

Paint them on

“One compelling advantage is that HOIPs are made using low temperatures and processed in solution,” said Carlos Silva, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “It takes much less energy to make them, and you can make big batches.” Silva co-led the study alongside Ajay Ram Srimath Kandada from Georgia Tech and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia.

It takes high temperatures to make most semiconductors in small quantities, and they are rigid to apply to surfaces, but HOIPs could be painted on to make LEDs, lasers or even window glass that could glow in any color from aquamarine to fuchsia. Lighting with HOIPs may require very little energy, and solar panel makers could boost photovoltaics’ efficiency and slash production costs.

The team led by Georgia Tech included researchers from the Université de Mons in Belgium and the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. The results were published on January 14, 2019, in the journal Nature Materials. The work was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, EU Horizon 2020, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Fond Québécois pour la Recherche, and the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office.

Quantum jumping jacks

Semiconductors in optoelectronic devices can either convert light into electricity or electricity into light. The researchers concentrated on processes connected to the latter: light emission.

The trick to getting a material to emit light is, broadly speaking, to apply energy to electrons in the material, so that they take a quantum leap up from their orbits around atoms then emit that energy as light when they hop back down to the orbits they had vacated. Established semiconductors can trap electrons in areas of the material that strictly limit the electrons’ range of motion then apply energy to those areas to make electrons do quantum leaps in unison to emit useful light when they hop back down in unison.

“These are quantum wells, two-dimensional parts of the material that confine these quantum properties to create these particular light emission properties,” Silva said.

Imaginary particle excitement

There is a potentially more attractive way to produce the light, and it is a core strength of the new hybrid semiconductors.

An electron has a negative charge, and an orbit it vacates after having been excited by energy is a positive charge called an electron hole. The electron and the hole can gyrate around each other forming a kind of imaginary particle, or quasiparticle, called an exciton.

“The positive-negative attraction in an exciton is called binding energy, and it’s a very high-energy phenomenon, which makes it great for light emitting,” Silva said.

When the electron and the hole reunite, that releases the binding energy to make light. But usually, excitons are very hard to maintain in a semiconductor.

“The excitonic properties in conventional semiconductors are only stable at extremely cold temperatures,” Silva said. “But in HOIPs the excitonic properties are very stable at room temperature.”

Ornate quasiparticle twirling

Excitons get freed up from their atoms and move around the material. In addition, excitons in an HOIP can whirl around other excitons, forming quasiparticles called biexcitons. And there’s more.

Excitons also spin around atoms in the material lattice. Much the way an electron and an electron hole create an exciton, this twirl of the exciton around an atomic nucleus gives rise to yet another quasiparticle called a polaron. All that action can result in excitons transitioning to polarons back. One can even speak of some excitons taking on a “polaronic” nuance.

Compounding all those dynamics is the fact that HOIPs are full of positively and negatively charged ions. The ornateness of these quantum dances has an overarching effect on the material itself.

Wave patterns resonate

The uncommon participation of atoms of the material in these dances with electrons, excitons, biexcitons and polarons creates repetitive nanoscale indentations in the material that are observable as wave patterns and that shift and flux with the amount of energy added to the material.

“In a ground state, these wave patterns would look a certain way, but with added energy, the excitons do things differently. That changes the wave patterns, and that’s what we measure,” Silva said. “The key observation in the study is that the wave pattern varies with different types of excitons (exciton, biexciton, polaronic/less polaronic).”

The indentations also grip the excitons, slowing their mobility through the material, and all these ornate dynamics may affect the quality of light emission.

Rubber band sandwich

The material, a halide organic-inorganic perovskite, is a sandwich of two inorganic crystal lattice layers with some organic material in between them – making HOIPs an organic-inorganic hybrid material. The quantum action happens in the crystal lattices.

The organic layer in between is like a sheet of rubber bands that makes the crystal lattices into a wobbly but stable dancefloor. Also, HOIPs are put together with many non-covalent bonds, making the material soft.

Individual units of the crystal take a form called perovskite, which is a very even diamond shape, with a metal in the center and halogens such as chlorine or iodine at the points, thus “halide.” For this study, the researchers used a 2D prototype with the formula (PEA)2PbI4.

Broadcom Inc. (NASDAQ: AVGO) announced today that its board of directors has appointed Diane M. Bryant as an independent director, and as a member of its compensation committee.

Ms. Bryant has more than three decades of executive leadership in the global semiconductor, enterprise IT solution development and deployment, and cloud computing services industries. Most recently, Ms. Bryant served as the Chief Operating Officer of Google Cloud, where she focused on accelerating the scale and reach of Google Cloud’s business, including optimization of the global supply chain, acceleration of customer adoption, and development of next generation information technology solutions.

Prior to Google Cloud, Ms. Bryant spent 32 years at Intel, most recently serving as Group President of Intel’s Data Center Group, the worldwide organization that develops server, storage and network platforms for the digital services economy, in 2017, having led that group since 2012. Before becoming Group President, Ms. Bryant served as Intel’s Corporate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, responsible for the corporate-wide information technology solutions and services that enable Intel’s business.

Ms. Bryant also serves on the board of directors of United Technologies Corporation, and on its audit and finance committees, and on the U.C. Davis Chancellor’s Board of Advisors and U.C. Davis College of Engineering Board of Advisors.

“Diane is a deeply experienced technologist and proven business leader with tremendous operational and strategic knowledge in cloud computing and enterprise IT which will be invaluable to Broadcom as we continue to expand our product offerings,” said Henry Samueli, Chairman of Broadcom’s board of directors.

Ms. Bryant received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from U.C. Davis in 1985. She attended Stanford Graduate School of Business, completing the Executive Program in 2011. Ms. Bryant holds four U.S. patents in mobile computing.

By Emmy Yi

SEMI Taiwan Testing Committee founded to strengthen the last line of defense to ensure the reliability of advanced semiconductor applications.

Mobile, high-performance computing (HPC), automotive, and IoT – the four future growth drivers of semiconductor industry, plus the additional boost from artificial intelligence (AI) and 5G – will spur exponential demand for multi-function and high-performance chips. Today, a 3D IC semiconductor structure is beginning to integrate multiple chips to extend functionality and performance, making heterogeneous integration an irreversible trend.

As the number of chips integrated in a single package increases, the structural complexity also rises. Not only will this make identifying chip defects harder, but the compatibility and interconnection between components will also introduce uncertainties that can undermine the reliability of the final ICs. Add to these challenges the need for tight cost control and a faster time to market, and it’s clear that semiconductor testing requires disruptive, innovative change. Traditional final-product testing focusing on finished components is now giving way to wafer- and system-level testing.

In addition, the traditional notion of design for testing, an approach that enhances testing controllability and observability, is now coupled with the imperative to test for design, which emphasizes drawing analytics insights from collected test data to help reduce design errors and shorten development cycles. Going forward, the relationship among design, manufacturing, packaging, and testing will no longer be un-directional. Instead, it will be a cycle of continuous improvement.

This paradigm shift in semiconductor testing, however, will also create a need for new industry standards and regulations, elevate visibility and security levels for shared data, require the optimization of testing time and costs, and lead to a shortage of testing professionals. Solving all these issues will require a joint effort by the industry and academia.

“With leading technologies and $4.7 billion in market value, Taiwan still holds the top spot in global semiconductor testing market,” said Terry Tsao, President of SEMI Taiwan. “When testing extends beyond the manufacturing process, it can play a critical role in ensuring quality throughout the entire life cycle from design and manufacturing to system integration while maintaining effective controls on development costs and schedules. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is in dire need of a common testing platform to enable the cross-disciplinary collaboration necessary for technical breakthroughs.”

The new SEMI Taiwan Testing Committee was formed to meet that need, gathering testing experts and academics from MediaTek, Intel, NXP Semiconductors, TSMC, UMC, ASE Technology, SPIL, KYEC, Teradyne, Advantest, FormFactor, MJC, Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor, and National Tsing Hua University to collaborate in building a complete testing ecosystem. The committee addresses common technical challenges faced by the industry and cultivates next-generation testing professionals to enable Taiwan to maintain its global leadership in semiconductor testing.

The SEMI Taiwan Testing Platform spans communities, expositions, programs, events, networking, business matching, advocacy, and market and technology insights. For more information about the SEMI Taiwan Testing platform, please contact Elaine Lee ([email protected]) or Ana Li ([email protected]).

Emmy Yi is a marketing specialist at SEMI Taiwan.  

This story originally appeared on the SEMI blog.

By Christian G. Dieseldorff

This year, SEMI ISS covered it all – from a high-level semiconductor market and global geopolitical overview down to the neuro morphic and quantum level. Here are key takeaways from the Day 1 keynote and Economic Trends and Market Perspectives presentations.

In the opening keynote, Anne Kelleher from Intel pointed to the huge growth of data, with fabs collecting more than 5 billion sensor data points each day. The challenge, Kelleher noted, is to turn massive amounts of data into valuable information. Moore’s law is not dead. New models of computing benefit still from Moore’s law and advances in Si/CMOS technologies for conventional, deep learning, neuro morphic and quantum computing.

With customers expecting continual improvements in applications, the question is whether the chip industry is moving fast enough to meet these expectations, Kelleher said. A broad supply chain, equipment and materials innovations, and attracting the “best of the best” college graduates to fuel innovation is key, she said.

In the economic trends session, Nicholas Burns (ambassador ret.) from Harvard University pointed out that we will see a major shift in power. The U.S. will remain the major world power over the next 10 years, but we will see a major shift in power in the next coming decades as the gap with countries like China, Russia and India continues to narrow.

Duncan Meldrum from Hilltop Economics said that we are passing the peak growth of economic cycle. He warns that a more likely outlook is that a global growth recession is developing. Although semiconductor MSI growth will see a noticeable slowdown in 2019 and 2020, the semiconductor industry is still healthy over the longer term.

Bob Johnson from Gartner sees demand shifting from consumer to commercial applications with higher ROIs and budgets. AI, IoT and 5D are the major enablers. He sees structural changes in the semiconductor industry especially for memory but also for Moore’s law with increasing costs and fewer players.

The DRAM markets shows volatility and NAND market may be negative in 2019 but non-memory are expected to accelerate mainly because of increasing content and some price hikes.

Overall Gartner expects good long-term growth with a CAGR (2017 to 2022) of 5.1%, outpacing 2011 to 2016 CAGR of 2.6%. After a strong 2018 with 13.4% revenue, he forecasts a slower 2019 with 2.6% growth followed by a 8% growth in 2020 and negative growth rate in 2021.

Andrea Lati of VLSI went “Back to fundamentals” in his presentation about the industry. VLSI sees a downside bias due to slowing global economy, tariffs, and trade wars. Future drivers are data economy, cloud, AI and automotive.

As memory leads the 2019 slowdown, analog, power, logic and other sectors remain in positive territory. VLSI lowered its semiconductor equipment forecast for 2018 from 20% (Jan. 2018) to 14% (Dec. 2018) but increased its sales outlook from 8% to 15% in 2018. VLSI expects revenue to slow into the first half of 2019 but increase to over 4% in the second half of the year, resulting in total 2019 drop of 2.7%. Semiconductor equipment sales are expected to drop from 14% in 2018 to -10% in 2019.

Michael Corbett of Linz Consulting, covering wafer fab materials in the years of 3D scaling, sees these as good times for the industry. His outlook for wafer fab materials is bullish based on strong MSI and because wafer fab materials suppliers are getting bigger because of M&As.

In the Market Perspective session, Sujeet Chand of Rockwell Automation pointed out that as more and more data is generated, the problem is how to get value of all the data collected. There is a need to create the right architecture for machine learning and AI and big data is increasingly being replaced by contextual/structured data. He expects Industry 4.0 to drive foundries to become smaller, more flexible and more productive.

In the Technology and Manufacturing session, Aki Sekiguchi of TEL addressed process challenges in the age of co-optimization. The semiconductor industry continues to expand, driven by massive growth of interconnected devices, with heavy demand for processing power and storage. He expects an exponential increase of data from about 40ZB in 2018 to 50ZB in 2020 to 163 ZB in 2026.

Major technologies such as DRAM, 3D NAND and logic are dealing with scaling challenges. The density of DRAM (Mb/chip) is plateauing according to 2015 to 2020 trend data, with DRAM is in need of EUV. Memory capacity demand is leading to increasing layers and higher aspect ratios that is concern for 3D NAND and mainly for plasma etch. With Logic already implementing 3D structures, it appears to be in a solid position.

Buddy Nicoson of Micron talked about his 50 years in the industry and looked ahead to the next 50. The anchors – quality, cost, scale and speed – won’t change. It has been a great journey so far with unprecedented opportunities and challenges ahead of us. We are getting into a convergence (specialization, integration) and solution-based phase. We will see some inflection points in the coming years, with the best yet to come.

Christian G. Dieseldorff is senior principal analyst in the Industry Research and Analysis group at SEMI in California.

This story first appeared on the SEMI blog.

SIA today filed comments to the Department of Commerce Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) in response to an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking of controls for “emerging” technologies. In accordance with requirements of the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 (ECRA), enacted into law as part of the defense authorization bill, BIS is required to establish export controls on certain “emerging and foundational technologies.” The SIA comments respond to the request for comments on “emerging” technologies, and we expect BIS to commence a separate rulemaking on “foundational” technologies sometime this year.

Maintaining a strong U.S. semiconductor industry is critical to our country’s economic and national security. Semiconductors are America’s fourth-largest export, and the semiconductor industry has a highly complex, specialized, and geographically widespread global supply chain. For these reasons, it is important for government and industry to work together to ensure U.S. export control policies both enhance our national security and continue to allow the U.S. semiconductor industry to grow and innovate. SIA has long collaborated with the U.S. government to support reforms and modernization of export control policy, particularly with respect to semiconductors.

The SIA comments outline the statutory framework set forth in ECRA and call on BIS to carefully consider each of the factors set forth in the statute in crafting narrowly tailored controls on emerging technologies. Among other things, ECRA calls on BIS to consider controls only on technologies essential to national security, whether these technologies are exclusive to the U.S. or are available from foreign sources, and the effectiveness of proposed controls. It also directs BIS to consider the impact of unilateral controls on specified technologies on domestic research and development and the economy as a whole. SIA’s comments provide detailed recommendations on how BIS can best implement these statutory mandates.

We are confident BIS, by following the statutory criteria set forth in ECRA and considering the input of affected stakeholders, will enhance national security while at the same time enabling the semiconductor industry in the U.S. to grow and innovate.

IC Insights is in the process of completing its forecast and analysis of the IC industry and will present its new findings in The McClean Report 2019, which will be published later this month.  Among the semiconductor industry data included in the new 400+ page report is an in-depth analysis of semiconductor capital spending.

The semiconductor industry is expected to allocate the largest portion of its capex spending for flash memory again in 2019, marking the third consecutive year that flash has led all other segments in spending (Figure 1).  Flash memory trailed the foundry segment in capex in 2016, but took an extra-large jump in 2017, growing 92% to $27.6 billion and increased another 16% to $31.9 billion in 2018 as manufacturers expanded and upgraded their production lines for 3D NAND to meet growing demand.  With much of the expansion now completed or expected to be wrapped up in 2019, flash capex is forecast to decline 18% this year to $26.0 billion, which still is a very healthy spending level.

Figure 1

•    In 2018, SK Hynix completed and opened M15 its new wafer fab facility in Cheongju, South Korea.  First devices produced from the factory were 72-layer 3D NAND flash.

•    Micron allocated significant resources to upgrade its two existing flash fabs in Singapore and broke ground on construction of a third NAND wafer fab there.

•    Toshiba Memory completed construction of a new 300mm wafer plant (Fab 6) at its Yokkaichi site in 1H18.  Operations at Phase 1 of the facility are expected to begin in early 2019.  Also, Toshiba announced that its next flash memory fab after Fab 6 would be located in Kitakami, Iwate.  The company broke ground on this fab in July 2018.

•    XMC/Yangtze River Storage Technology (YMTC), which is owned by Tsinghua Unigroup, completed construction of its new fab, installed equipment, and began small-volume production of 32-layer 3D NAND flash.

•    Samsung and all of the other “legacy” flash suppliers are well aware of the big plans that China has to be a player in the 3D NAND flash market.  Samsung will continue to invest heavily to stay far ahead of existing competitors or new startups and maintain its competitive edge against any who think they can wrestle marketshare away.  Samsung spent $13.0 billion on flash capex in 2017 and $9.0 billion in 2018, accounting for 28% of the total $31.9 billion in flash memory capital spending last year.  IC Insights estimates Samsung will spend another $7.0 billion for flash capex in 2019.

When German mineralogist Gustav Rose stood on the slopes of Russia’s Ural Mountains in 1839 and picked up a piece of a previously undiscovered mineral, he had never heard of transistors or diodes or had any concept of how conventional electronics would become an integral part of our daily lives. He couldn’t have anticipated that the rock he held in his hand, which he named “perovskite,” could be a key to revolutionizing electronics as we know them.

In 2017, University of Utah physicist Valy Vardeny called perovskite a “miracle material” for an emerging field of next-generation electronics, called spintronics, and he’s standing by that assertion. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, Vardeny, along with Jingying Wang, Dali Sun (now at North Carolina State University) and colleagues present two devices built using perovskite to demonstrate the material’s potential in spintronic systems. Its properties, Vardeny says, bring the dream of a spintronic transistor one step closer to reality.

The full study can be found here.

Spintronics

A conventional digital electronic system conveys a binary signal (think 1s and 0s) through pulses of electrons carried through a conductive wire. Spintronics can convey additional information via another characteristic of electrons, their spin direction (think up or down). Spin is related to magnetism. So spintronics uses magnetism to align electrons of a certain spin, or “inject” spin into a system.

If you’ve ever done the old science experiment of turning a nail into a magnet by repeatedly dragging a magnet along its length, then you’ve already dabbled in spintronics. The magnet transfers information to the nail. The trick is then transporting and manipulating that information, which requires devices and materials with finely tuned properties. Researchers are working toward the milestone of a spin transistor, a spintronics version of the electronic components found in practically all modern electronics. Such a device requires a semiconductor material in which a magnetic field can easily manipulate the direction of electrons’ spin–a property called spin-orbit coupling. It’s not easy to build such a transistor, Wang says. “We keep searching for new materials to see if they’re more suitable for this purpose.”

Here’s where perovskites come into play.

Perovskites

Perovskites are a class of mineral with a particular atomic structure. Their value as a technological material has only became apparent in the past 10 years. Because of that atomic structure, researchers have been developing perovskite into a material for making solar panels. By 2018 they’d achieved an efficiency of up to 23 percent of solar energy converted to electrical energy–a big step up from 3.8 percent in 2009.

In the meantime, Vardeny and his colleagues were exploring the possibilities of spintronics and the various materials that could prove effective in transmitting spin. Because of heavy lead atoms in perovskite, physicists predicted that the mineral may possess strong spin-orbit coupling. In a 2017 paper, Vardeny and physics assistant professor Sarah Li showed that a class of perovskites called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites do indeed possess large spin-orbit coupling. Also, the lifetime of spin injected into the hybrid materials lasted a relatively long time. Both results suggested that this kind of hybrid perovskite held promise as a spintronics material.

Two spintronic devices

The next step, which Vardeny and Wang accomplished in their recent work, was to incorporate hybrid perovskite into spintronic devices. The first device is a spintronic light-emitting diode, or LED. The semiconductor in a traditional LED contains electrons and holes–places in atoms where electrons should be, but aren’t. When electrons flow through the diode, they fill the holes and emit light.

Wang says that a spintronic LED works much the same way, but with a magnetic electrode, and with electron holes polarized to accommodate electrons of a certain spin.  The LED lit up with circularly polarized electroluminescence, Wang says, showing that the magnetic electrode successfully transferred spin-polarized electrons into the material.

“It’s not self-evident that if you put a semiconductor and a ferromagnet together you get a spin injection,” Vardeny adds. “You have to prove it. And they proved it.”

The second device is a spin valve. Similar devices already exist and are used in devices such as computer hard drives. In a spin valve, an external magnetic field flips the polarity of magnetic materials in the valve between an open, low-resistance state and a closed, high-resistance state.

Wang and Vardeny’s spin valve does more. With hybrid perovskite as the device material, the researchers can inject spin into the device and then cause the spin to precess, or wobble, within the device using magnetic manipulation.

That’s a big deal, the researchers say. “You can develop spintronics that are not only useful for recording information and data storage, but also calculation,” Wang says. “That was an initial goal for the people who started the field of spintronics, and that’s what we are still working on.”

Taken together, these experiments show that perovskite works as a spintronic semiconductor. The ultimate goal of a spin-based transistor is still several steps away, but this study lays important groundwork for the path ahead.

“What we’ve done is to prove that what people thought was possible with perovskite actually happens,” Vardeny says. “That’s a big step.”

The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) opened this week with the theme “Golden Age of Semiconductor: Enabling the Next Industrial Revolution.” The annual three-day conference of C-level executives gives the year’s first comprehensive outlook of the global electronics manufacturing industry.

For ISS 2019’s nearly 300 attendees, opening day highlighted market and technology opportunities and the high-water mark for semiconductor manufacturing supply chain investments in 2018. Deep discussions on applications, disruptions and Industrial Revolution 4.0 will mark today, Day 2. Day 3 will feature presentations on industry workforce development and the evolving U.S.-China relationship and convene an expert panel on “The Next Semiconductor Revolution: Filling the Gap Between Smart Speakers and Autonomous Vehicles” to culminate SEMI‘s business leader annual kick-off event.

Opening keynote speaker Ann Kellehere, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Technology and Manufacturing Group at Intel, observed that data is powering the fourth industry revolution and the expansion of compute markets. Excellent customer experience and new technologies including Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous vehicles are key drivers of data growth.

Today, fabs collect more than 5 billion sensor data points each day. The challenge, Kellehere noted, is to turn massive amounts of data into valuable information. With customers expecting continual improvements in applications, the question is whether the chip industry is moving fast enough to meet these expectations. A broad supply chain, equipment and materials innovations, and attracting the “best of the best” college graduates to fuel innovation is key, she said.

In the Economic Trends session, presenters took on macroeconomic trends and detailed industry-specific forecasts:

Ambassador (Ret.) Nicholas Burns, Harvard Kennedy School of Government, noted the United States is trailing China in a battle for technological supremacy. By 2050, Indo-Pacific could become the world’s locus of economic power, potentially leading to conflict and instability. The rise of nationalism in China, India, Japan, Russia and the U.S. is a major trend, and the power gap between the U.S. and China, Russia and India is narrowing. From 1979 through last, China and the U.S. came together to solve big problems, he noted. The world has shifted ominously from strategic engagement to outright strategic competition.

Duncan Meldrum, Hilltop Economics, noted the world has passed the peak of its current economic expansion, with GDP peaking in 2018 and gradually slowing to 2.7 percent trend growth. The consensus outlook is for strong global economic growth. While an alternate outlook holds that a global recession will develop, a deep growth recession isn’t expected. The problem today is that global economic uncertainty is at an all-time high, suppressing investment and growth.

Bob Johnson, Gartner, forecasts businesses will get $5 trillion of value from AI by 2025 as businesses explore ways to implement AI to tap its tremendous potential. AI, IoT and 5G are major enablers of new value, with market demand shifting from consumer to commercial applications offering higher returns on investments, Johnson said. Future semiconductor market drivers include augmented analytics, digital twins, AI, autonomous things, blockchain, smart spaces and quantum computing.

Andrea Lati, VLSI Research, expects the semiconductor slowdown to continue into the first half of 2019 and said it could face a decline of as much as 35 percent. The strategic question for industry leaders is how to transition from a commodity provider to a value provider. In 2019, both semiconductor equipment and assembly sales are forecast to drop 13 percent, ending equipment’s strong run since 2016.

Michael Corbett, Linx Consulting, provided an upbeat outlook for the materials industry, which is enjoying a record expansion with MSI a key driver and record levels of capital expenditures reflecting very high utilization across both 200mm and 300mm. Materials market trends include a wafer fab materials CAGR of 6.9 percent from 2017 to 2022 and industry growth of $26 billion in 2018 to $33 billion in 2022.

The afternoon session focused on Market Perspectives, including smart manufacturing, human health, AI and 5G.

Sujeet Chand, Rockwell Automation, outlined Smart manufacturing best practices for semiconductor production. He envisions big data being increasingly replaced by data structured based on target factory outcomes that dictate whether to run analytics on the edge or in the cloud. Semiconductor fab productivity driven by digitization will grow faster in the next 10 years than in the past 50 as information and operational technology converge to speed the optimization of semiconductor fabs and supply networks, he said.

Igor Fisch, Selexis, focused on how the current golden age of semiconductors is shaping human health. He pointed to the critical importance of chips in biotechnology as big data becomes key to the analytics that will give rise to personalized diagnostics and therapies. Drug discovery and development will rely on massive computing power and data storage, with semiconductor and supercomputer technologies key enablers of precision medicine.

Eric Jones, Enthought, noted that semiconductor manufacturers must reimagine themselves over the next decade to power their own digital transformation. Data consolidation, automation and simulation will enable the predictive power – key to digital transformation – of AI and machine learning, he said. However, the greatest challenge is related to changing company culture, philosophy and organizational design.

Sree Koratala, Ericsson, forecasts 5G will evolve from initial use cases to mainstream adoption in 2024. Connectivity has reached an inflection point, with the focus shifting from consumers to businesses including the immersive experiences of virtual and augmented reality (AR/VR), autonomous control and cloud robotics. 4G and 5G will co-exist to deliver a much larger impact to people and businesses, she noted.

Sarah Cooper, Amazon Web Services, highlighting IoT trends, offered a vision of products learning from collected data to personalize functionality. Product differentiation is not about the specifications but about the customer experience. Coupling device data with machine learning can create a product that adapts to changing customer needs, eliminating the need to develop separate SKUs, she noted.

Days 2 and 3 at ISS will delve deeper into the industry with presentations by: Tokyo Electron Limited,Xperi, Micron Technology, Google, Applied Materials, McKinsey & Company, Brewer Science, DECA Technologies, Carbon, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and SEMI. 

The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) examines global economic, technology, market, business and geo-political developments influencing the global electronics manufacturing industry along with their implications for your strategic business decisions. For more than 35 years, ISS has been the premier semiconductor conference for senior executives to acquire the latest trend data, technology highlights and industry perspective to support business decisions, customer strategies and the pursuit of greater profitability.

SEMI, the global industry association serving the electronics manufacturing supply chain, today announced that Mike Russo has joined SEMI as vice president of Global Industry Advocacy, based in the company’s Washington D.C. office. Reporting to SEMI President and CEO Ajit Manocha, Russo oversees SEMI’s government relations program and advocacy efforts worldwide, leading the development and execution of strategies to strengthen SEMI’s public policy program and the association’s initiatives addressing the broader semiconductor industry’s talent gap, a top SEMI priority.

“In light of the changing geopolitical dynamics around the world seriously impacting our industry, we are thrilled to welcome government affairs veteran Mike to SEMI,” said Manocha. “His arrival at SEMI to support SEMI’s Global Advocacy mission is very timely. Mike is a high-impact leader with rich public policy experience in the semiconductor industry and an invaluable asset to SEMI and our members as we advocate for the industry across trade, tax, technology and talent. Already, Mike is broadening the scope of SEMI’s advocacy work with global programs that address the industry’s critical need to build the workforce of the future.”

Russo’s experience as a government affairs executive in the semiconductor industry includes spearheading strategic initiatives in supply chain innovation, infrastructure development, education and workforce development. Most recently, he served as president of Entregar Consulting Group, a firm focused on strategic, public-private partnerships in manufacturing and technology.

For nearly a decade, Russo led the U.S. corporate office of government affairs for GLOBALFOUNDRIES, the nation’s largest global contract semiconductor chipmaker. In that role, Russo oversaw government relations, regulatory affairs and strategic initiatives.

In government, Russo served as a senior staff member in both the Senate and House and has served in various capacities as an advisor to the U.S. government on manufacturing industrial base policy, including leading the national advisory group for the former National Network of Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI), now Manufacturing USA, under the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology  for Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP).

Rudolph Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: RTEC) announced today that it has received orders for 12 of its Dragonfly™ G2 system, just months after releasing the product. Several systems were delivered in the fourth quarter to the largest OSAT where the Dragonfly G2 systems displaced incumbent 3D technology and retained the Company’s market leadership in 2D macro inspection. The remaining systems will ship in the first half of 2019 to OSAT, IDM, and Foundry customers who are adopting the Dragonfly G2 platform for its high productivity in two-dimensional (2D) inspection, and its accuracy and repeatability in three-dimensional (3D) inspection of the smallest copper pillars. The Company expects additional adoptions of the Dragonfly G2 system across multiple key market segments in the first half of 2019, which validates Rudolph’s collaborative R&D approach with its key customers.

The new Dragonfly G2 platform delivers up to 150% improvement in productivity over legacy systems as well as exceeds competitive system throughputs. Its modular architecture provides a flexible platform with plug-and-play configurability to combine 2D with 3D Truebump™ Technology for accurate copper pillar/bump height measurements. Clearfind™ Technology detects non-visual residue defects and advanced sensor technology measures 3D features and CD metrology. Additionally, the Dragonfly G2 platform has been specifically architected to allow the measurement, data collection, and analysis of bump interconnects nearing 100 million bumps per wafer using Rudolph’s Discover® software and advanced computing architecture.

“We are pleased that our leading-edge customers across multiple market segments are quickly recognizing the value of the Dragonfly G2 system,” said Michael Plisinski, chief executive officer at Rudolph. “Today’s interconnects for advanced memory are now at or below five microns, which require higher accuracy and repeatability versus standard copper pillar bumps. With approximately 65 wafer-level packages in today’s high-end smartphones, a single weak interconnect or reliability failure can result in a high cost of return, driving our customers’ need for the enhanced process control performance. Defect sensitivity, resolution, and productivity are combined in the Dragonfly G2 system to deliver a capability and cost of ownership that is unparalleled in the competitive space.”