Category Archives: MEMS

– In 2015,Taiwan is projected to have the highest capex for semiconductor manufacturing worldwide. Taiwan’s aggressive semiconductor factory plans are bringing exhibitors and attendees to SEMICON Taiwan 2015 on September 2-4 at the TWTC Nangang Exhibition Hall. Over 40,000 visitors are expected to attend the exhibition and conferences.  Entering its 20th year, SEMICON Taiwan connects attendees with the companies, people, products, and information facilitating the future for design and manufacturing for the advanced electronics industries.

According to SEMI market reports, foundry and DRAM are the two sectors of capital equipment investment in Taiwan, with OSATs’ advance packaging facilities as a key growth driver. Fab equipment spending in Taiwan is projected to be about $10.5 billion in 2015, approaching 30 percent of the overall industry spending on fab equipment. Overall, Taiwan represents 21 percent of the installed fab capacity globally and 25 percent of the installed 300mm capacity.

In 2015 alone, companies in Taiwan are forecast to spend $1.5 billion or more on packaging and test equipment. With the growing importance of packaging and testing, SEMI will host the Silicon in Packaging (SiP) Global Summit 2015 from September 3-4. The two-day SiP Global Summit 2015 consists of two major forums: 3D-IC Technology Forum and Embedded and Wafer Level Package Technology Forum.

SEMICON Taiwan covers a wide array of critical issues. Business programs will include the Executive Summit, Market Trends Forum, CFO Executive Summit, and Memory Executive Summit. Technology programs include: Materials Forum, Sustainable Manufacturing Forum, Advanced Packaging Technology Symposium, TechXPOTs, MEMS Forum, High-Tech Facility International Forum, eMDC Forum, Patterning Challenges (Cost vs. Performance), IC Design Summit, and more.

SEMICON Taiwan also features: Supplier Search Program and Buyers Briefing.  As always, the event features a Leadership Gala dinner, an elite networking event and one of the most important annual executive gatherings for the high-tech industry in Taiwan.

Among the many exhibition technology pavilions, SEMICON Taiwan will host:

  • Smart Manufacturing Pavilion
  • Materials Pavilion
  • Precision Machinery Pavilion
  • CMP (Chemical Mechanical Planarization) Pavilion
  • Secondary Market Pavilion
  • AOI (Automated Optical Inspection) Pavilion
  • MIRDC (Metal Industries Reach & Development Center) Pavilion
  • High-Tech Facility Pavilion

Also, SEMICON Taiwan will host country pavilions:

  • Belgium Pavilion
  • Holland High Tech Pavilion
  • German Pavilion
  • Moscow Pavilion
  • Cross-Strait Pavilion
  • Kyushu (Japan) Pavilion
  • Korea Pavilion
  • SICA (Shanghai Integrated Circuit Association) Pavilion

SEMI Taiwan (www.semi.org/ch/) hosts SEMICON Taiwan with TAITRA and TSIA as co-organizers. The event is advised by the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs.

To learn more about exhibiting at SEMICON Taiwan 2015, visit www.semicontaiwan.org.

A new route to ultrahigh density, ultracompact integrated photonic circuitry has been discovered by researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. The team has developed a technique for effectively controlling pulses of light in closely packed nanoscale waveguides, an essential requirement for high-performance optical communications and chip-scale quantum computing.

Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, led a study in which a mathematical concept called “adiabatic elimination” is applied to optical nanowaveguides, the photonic versions of electronic circuits. Through the combination of coupled systems — a standard technique for controlling the movement of light through a pair of waveguides — and adiabatic elimination, Zhang and his research team are able to eliminate an inherent and vexing “crosstalk” problem for nanowaveguides that are too densely packed.

Integrated electronic circuitry is approaching its limits because of heat dissipation and power consumption issues. Photonics, in which electrical signals moving through copper wires and cables are replaced by pulses of light carrying data over optical fibers, is a highly touted alternative, able to carry greater volumes of data at faster speeds, while giving off much less heat and using far less power. However, the crosstalk problem in coupled optical nanowaveguides has been a major technological roadblock.

“When nanowaveguides in close proximity are coupled, the light in one waveguide impacts the other. This coupling becomes particularly severe when the separation is below the diffraction limit, placing a restriction on how close together the waveguides can be placed,” Zhang says. “We have experimentally demonstrated an adiabatic elimination scheme that effectively cuts off the cross-talk between them, enabling on-demand dynamical control of the coupling between two closely packed waveguides. Our approach offers an attractive route for the control of optical information in integrated nanophotonics, and provides a new way to design densely packed, power-efficient nanoscale photonic components, such as compact modulators, ultrafast optical signal routers and interconnects.”

Zhang, who also holds an appointment with the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute (ENSI) at Berkeley, is the corresponding author of a paper describing this research in Nature Communications. The paper is titled “Adiabatic elimination based coupling control in densely packed subwavelength waveguides.” Michael Mrejen, Haim Suchowski and Taiki Hatakeyama are the lead authors. Other authors are Chih-hui Wu, Liang Feng, Kevin O’Brien and Yuan Wang.

“A general approach to achieving active control in coupled waveguide systems is to exploit optical nonlinearities enabled by a strong control pulse,” Zhang says. “However this approach suffers from the nonlinear absorption induced by the intense control pulse as the signal and its control propagate in the same waveguide.”

Zhang and his group turned to the adiabatic elimination concept, which has a proven track record in atomic physics and other research fields. The idea behind adiabatic elimination is to decompose large dynamical systems into smaller ones by using slow versus fast dynamics.

“Picture three buckets side-by-side with the first being filled with water from a tap, the middle being fed from the first bucket though a hole while feeding the third bucket through another hole,” says co-lead author Mrejen. “If the flow rate into the middle bucket is equal to the flow rate out of it, the second bucket will not accumulate water. This, in a basic manner, is adiabatic elimination. The middle bucket allows for some indirect control on the dynamics compared to the case in which water goes directly from the first bucket to the third bucket.”

Zhang and his research group apply this concept to a coupled system of optical nanowaveguides by inserting a third waveguide in the middle of the coupled pair. Only about 200 nanometers separate each of the three waveguides, a proximity that would normally generate too much cross-talk to allow for any control over the coupled system. However, the middle waveguide operates in a “dark” mode, in the sense that it doesn’t seem to participate in the exchange of light between the two outer waveguides since it does not accumulate any light.

“Even though the dark waveguide in the middle doesn’t seem to be involved, it nonetheless influences the dynamics of the coupled system,” says co-lead author Suchowski, who is now with the Tel Aviv University. “By judiciously selecting the relative geometries of the outer and intermediate waveguides, we achieve adiabatic elimination, which in turn enables us to control the movement of light through densely packed nanowaveguides. Until now, this has been almost impossible to do.”

This research was supported by the Office of Naval Research.

“Growing photolithography equipment markets in advanced packaging, MEMS and LEDs are attracting new players; but they have to navigate complex roadmaps,” announced Yole Développement (Yole). Under its new report, Yole’s analysts announce a projection system market for advanced packaging, MEMS and LEDs reaching more than US$150M in 2014. To perform this report, they interviewed leaders and outsiders of this market such as SUSS MicroTec, ASML, EV Group, Rudolph Technologies, USHIO. They analyzed their market positioning and their technical solutions.

Within a highly competitive and innovative environment, Yole’s analysis shows, at first glance, some similarities between “More Moore” and “More than Moore”. However the analysis is more complex.

“Photolithography Equipment & Materials for Advanced Packaging, MEMS and LED Applications” analysis provides a comprehensive overview of all the key lithography technologies used in advanced packaging, MEMS and LED applications and benchmarks them in terms of feature requirements. Yole’s analysts provide examples of lithography process steps for these applications. In parallel, Yole’s report describes associated technological breakthroughs and manufacturing process. More insights are included on specific lithography equipment tools for advanced packaging, MEMS and LED devices.

illus_lithography_market_yole_june2015

The semiconductor industry is very often identified by its “More Moore” players, driven by technology downscaling and cost reduction. There is one clear leader supplying photolithography tools to the “More Moore” industry: ASML, based in The Netherlands. The company proposes lithography equipment with $10M unit price and incredible optics, mechanics and precision stage in order to reach sub 20nm precision (Latest announcement from ASML, April 2015). ASML is followed by two Japanese outsiders, Nikon and Canon.

“Providing this market with photolithography equipment is highly complex and there are gigantic barriers to market entry,” asserted Claire Troadec, Technology & Market Analyst, Semiconductor Manufacturing at Yole. Enormous R&D investments are required as the key features to print shrink ever further. Also, the tolerances specified are very aggressive and thus equipment complexity keeps on increasing.

In the “More than Moore” industry the Holy Grail isn’t downscaling any more – it is adding functionality: according to Yole’s analysis, there are two clear leaders today: SUSS MicroTec (Latest order: lithography tools from TDK, Feb. 2015) in the MEMS and sensors industry, and Ultratech in the advanced packaging industry. Both players are closely followed by the following outsiders, EV Group, Rudolph Technologies and USHIO.

“But the similarities between both worlds, are only superficial,” commented Amandine Pizzagalli, Technology & Market Analyst, Advanced Packaging & Semiconductor Manufacturing at Yole. “Indeed market entry barrier is much lower in the “More than Moore” market. Equipment in the Advanced Packaging, MEMS and LEDs industries is less complex but customer adoption needs are higher, which leads to a much broader photolithography landscape,” she added.

The photolithography market structure for these three industries is very different compared to the “More Moore”, or mainstream semiconductor, industry. New entrants can penetrate these markets with a good knowledge of the technological building blocks. But the key to success is to adapt the equipment to the specific customer’s needs. That means that these markets are complex to develop and that they take a long time to penetrate.

To develop their knowledge and expand their range of products, some players entered through acquisition. Rudolph Technologies acquired Azores Corp. in 2012 to enter the advanced packaging photolithography equipment arena. Also in 2012, SUSS MicroTec acquired Tamarack Scientific Co. Inc. to enlarge its semiconductor back end photolithography equipment market.

Others like Orbotech, which acquired a leading MEMS and advanced packaging company, SPTS, is today only present in substrate and PCB direct imaging.

in this report, competition trends are carefully analyzed and presented as a competitive landscape and competitive analysis of the major equipment and materials suppliers involved in Advanced Packaging, MEMS and LED applications. Finally, a section is also dedicated to disruptive technologies such as LDI, laser ablation and nanoimprint lithography, which could reshape the lithography landscape in the future. Yole describes possible reshaping scenarios are described, including acquisitions, mergers, and joint ventures, along with their anticipated impact on the global photolithography market.

The latest manufacturing, materials and production developments in semiconductor and related technologies will be featured at SEMICON West 2015 on July 14-16 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.  Semiconductor processing is at a crossroads and is changing how companies operate to be competitive. Learning about breakthrough technology and networking is essential to remain ahead of the curve.  

More than 25,000 professionals are expected, and over 600 companies will exhibit the latest in semiconductor manufacturing.  Major semiconductor manufacturers, foundry, fabless companies, equipment and materials suppliers — plus leading companies in MEMS, displays, printed/flexible electronics, PV, and other emerging technologies — attend SEMICON West.

SEMICON West will feature valuable on-exhibition floor technical sessions and programs that are included in the  $100 registration “expo pass” (registration fee increases on July 11).  Keynote events include: 

·         “Scaling the Walls of Sub-14nm Manufacturing” with panelists from Qualcomm, Stanford University, ASE and IBM, moderated by imec’s Jo de Boeck, senior VP of Corporate Technology (July 14, 9:00-10:00am)

·         “The Internet of Things and the Next Fifty Years of Moore’s Law“ by Intel’s Doug Davis, senior VP and GM of loT (July 15, 9:00am-9:45am)

TechXPOTs will provide updates in areas including test, advanced materials and processes, advanced packaging, productivity and emerging markets and technologies. TechXPOTs include:

·      What’s Next for MEMS? With speakers from ASE, CEA-Leti, EV Group, MEMS Industry Group, Silicon Valley Band of Angels, Teledyne DALSA, and Yole Developpement (July 14, 10:30am-12:30pm)

·      Automating Semiconductor Test Productivity with speakers from ASE, Optimal+, Texas Instruments, and Xcerra (July 14, 10:30am-12:30pm)

·      Materials Session: Contamination Control in the Sub-20nm Era with speakers from Entegris, Intel, JSR Micro, Matheson, and Nanometrics; moderated by Mike Corbett, Linx (July 14, 1:30pm-3:30pm)

·      Emerging Generation Memory Technology: Update on 3DNAND, MRAM, and RRAM (July 14, 1:30pm-3:40pm).

·      The Evolution of the New 200mm Fab for the Internet of Everything with speakers from Entrepix, Genmark Automation, Lam Research, Qorvo, and Surplus Global (July 15, 2:00pm-4:00pm)

·      Monetizing the IoT: Opportunities and Challenges for the Semiconductor Sector with Amkor, Cadence Design Systems, Ernst & Young, Freescale Semiconductor, and Gartner; moderated by Edward Sperling, Semiconductor Engineering (July 16, 10:30am-12:30pm)

·      The Factory of the (Near) Future: Using Industrial IoT and 3D Printing  with speakers from AirLiquide, Applied Materials, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Proto Cafe (July 16, 1:00pm-3:00pm) 

The Silicon Innovation Forum will be held on July 14-15.  A special exposition segment, this area will include exhibits and two days of presentations.  The first day will be a forum where start-up companies seeking investment capital will present to a panel of investors.  Open to all attendees, this session will feature exciting new technologies.  The second day will be a forum on new research. Attendees can hear presentations on advanced research from SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, International Consortium for Advanced Manufacturing Research, SUNY Network of Excellence – Materials & Advanced Manufacturing, Novati Technologies, MIST Center, Micro/Nano Electronics Metrology at NIST, Texas State University and Georgia Tech Heat Lab. 

On July 16, University Day welcomes students and faculty to learn about the microelectronics industry, connect with industry representatives, and explore career opportunities. University Day is on the Keynote Stage (North Hall E). The agenda includes career networking, exploration forum, expo and SEMICON West tours.

For the eighth year, SEMICON West will be co-located with Intersolar North America, the leading solar technology conference and exhibition in the U.S.  Premier sponsors of SEMICON West 2015 include Applied Materials, KLA-Tencor, and Lam Research.  Register now at www.semiconwest.org.

The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards “the Internet of things” — the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.

Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes — or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.

Last week, at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, MIT researchers presented a new power converter chip that can harvest more than 80 percent of the energy trickling into it, even at the extremely low power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous experimental ultralow-power converters had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.

Moreover, the researchers’ chip achieves those efficiency improvements while assuming additional responsibilities. Where its predecessors could use a solar cell to either charge a battery or directly power a device, this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.

All of those operations also share a single inductor — the chip’s main electrical component — which saves on circuit board space but increases the circuit complexity even further. Nonetheless, the chip’s power consumption remains low.

“We still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,” says Dina Reda El-Damak, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. “We need to regulate the input to extract the maximum power, and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best. And we want to do it without compromising the performance, at very limited input power levels — 10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt — for the Internet of things.”

Ups and downs

The circuit’s chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery, and the device the cell is powering. If the battery operates for too long at a voltage that’s either too high or too low, for instance, its chemical reactants break down, and it loses the ability to hold a charge.

To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical Engineering, use an inductor, which is a wire wound into a coil. When a current passes through an inductor, it generates a magnetic field, which in turn resists any change in the current.

Throwing switches in the inductor’s path causes it to alternately charge and discharge, so that the current flowing through it continuously ramps up and then drops back down to zero. Keeping a lid on the current improves the circuit’s efficiency, since the rate at which it dissipates energy as heat is proportional to the square of the current.

Once the current drops to zero, however, the switches in the inductor’s path need to be thrown immediately; otherwise, current could begin to flow through the circuit in the wrong direction, which would drastically diminish its efficiency. The complication is that the rate at which the current rises and falls depends on the voltage generated by the solar cell, which is highly variable. So the timing of the switch throws has to vary, too.

Electric hourglass

To control the switches’ timing, El-Damak and Chandrakasan use an electrical component called a capacitor, which can store electrical charge. The higher the current, the more rapidly the capacitor fills. When it’s full, the circuit stops charging the inductor.

The rate at which the current drops off, however, depends on the output voltage, whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip. Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance. El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes. As the current drops, it charges a subset of those capacitors, whose selection is determined by the solar cell’s voltage. Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor’s path are flipped.

Imec and Holst Centre have developed a small NO2 sensor featuring a low power consumption in the mW range. The sensors have a low detection limit for NO2 (<10 ppb) and a fast response time. They are particularly well suited for air quality monitoring and serve as a solution to the increased demand for accurate local air quality monitoring for indoor and outdoor environments. The sensors are being tested in real-life situations, as part of an environmental monitoring platform.

While wearable technology that measures body parameters has become increasingly popular in recent years, the Intuitive Internet of Things (I2oT) is next on the horizon: connecting everybody and everything everywhere with data stored in the cloud, turning the massive amount of data in information to make the right decisions, to take the right actions exactly as we need or want. The I2oT is expected to manage the sustainability, complexity and safety of our world. It will increase our comfort and wellbeing in many ways.

Health issues resulting from poor air quality are a growing concern for consumers and accurate monitoring is becoming more and more in demand, for both outdoor and indoor environments.

Air quality is typically measured on just a few distinct locations per city, with specialized equipment. Many current gas sensors are large in size, have high power consumption and are too cost prohibitive to be implemented on a large scale for I2oT applications. Imec and Holst Centre have developed small, simple, low power and high quality autonomous sensors that wirelessly communicate with the environment and the cloud.

Imec and Holst Centre’s NO2 sensors were integrated in the Aireas air quality network, a multiple sensor network in the city center of Eindhoven (the Netherlands). The purpose was to test -in actual outdoor conditions and long term- the stability of the sensors, and benchmark them against established reference sensors. The sensors are operational since early May 2015 and contribute with valuable outdoor sensor data since then. During traffic rush hours, the sensors detect a significant increase of NO2 concentration up to the health safety limits.

Imec and Holst Centre are currently deploying a similar sensor network inside the Holst Centre building in Eindhoven to test the sensors for indoor air quality monitoring. This environmental monitoring platform today includes it proprietary NO2 sensor and commercial sensors for temperature, relative humidity and CO2. The measured levels can be monitored live, over the internet. In a next step, proprietary low-cost low-power sensors will be added for CO2, VOCs (Volatile Organic Compounds), Ozone, and particle matter.

The generated sensor data are transferred to the cloud, stored in a database and immediately available on (mobile) applications, explained Kathleen Philips, director of imec’s perceptive systems for the intuitive internet of things R&D program.

“Data fusion methodology and advanced algorithms enable us to combine data from different sensors such as temperature, several gasses, humidity, human presence detection and to derive contextual knowledge. This information contributes to a correct interpretation of the situation and helps us to take adequate actions to solve the problem. In this way, we have developed a context-aware intuitive sensing system.”

Companies interested in early application validation and development for distributed IoT networks and/or in the innovative technology and circuits to realize them are invited to become a partner in our R&D program. IP can also be licensed.

Photo: NO2 sensor + network hardware for wireless sensor network

Photo: NO2 sensor + network hardware for wireless sensor network

By Yann Guillou, Business Development Manager, SEMI Europe

Based on a need expressed by MEMS industry actors and with their strong support, SEMI has chosen to transform its MEMS Networking Tech Seminar and the MEMS Industry Forum of SEMICON Europa into a much larger, combined conference/exhibition event called the European MEMS Summit, giving actors in MEMS a worthy stage to showcase and talk about technology, business and applications. The first edition of this Summit will take place on September 17-18, 2015 in Milan, Italy and its theme will be “Sensing the Planet, MEMS for Life.”

With a stellar lineup of speakers, SEMI is hoping to cover the spectrum of issues pressing the MEMS industry today. The two-day program will be broken up into five segments, one dealing with the market and business, another with MEMS technology and three sessions appealing to the application of MEMS technology in consumer goods and wearables, the automotive industry and the Internet of Things.

Keynote speakers will include high-level representatives of MEMS giants Bosch Sensortec and STMicroelectronics as well as the largest MEMS fabless, InvenSense, and the largest IC foundry, TSMC. Be ready to hear “Smart” “Things” about “Sensors” and “MEMS” during their presentations titled:

  • Smart Systems for IoT, STMicroelectronics
  • Building Smart Sensors for a Connected World, TSMC
  • Internet of Sensors, InvenSense
  • MEMS Sensors: Enabler for the IOT, Bosch Sensortec

Attendees will leave the Summit with a better understanding of the evolution of MEMS in the marketplace and of the technological advances in MEMS and sensors.

MEMS foundries such as X-FAB and Tronics Microsystems will share their perspectives about the new challenges facing the industry and business opportunities. Focusing on the dynamics in China, SITRI will explain why it is critical to build a domestic MEMS business and will invite companies to revisit the Chinese market as a strategic element in their global business strategy.

Technology-wise, Yole Developpement will inform attendees about what to expect in the near future and how MEMS are contributing to sensing our world. Continuing with a technology focus, LETI will present the key emerging enabling technologies for MEMS they are developing. Focusing on thin film PZT materials, STMicroelectronics will explain how promising these materials are for actuators, opening a complete new field of applications. Covering packaging, ASE will address the integration aspect with flexible integration solutions enabling cost effecting HVM solutions.

The application sessions will give attendees an in-depth view of the new realm of opportunities open to those who develop MEMS technology. ARM will explain their strategy for IoT. Sensirion will describe the key success factors, addressing for instance the monolithic integration to enhance the miniaturization of the sensors. ams AG will present brand-new achievements in environmental sensor products while Infineon will talk about innovation in sensors for consumer products. IHS will highlight the changes in the automotive MEMS market and supplier landscape. Freescale and a few other companies will present their perspectives on this changing automotive landscape.

In addition, the event will present attendees with a chance to network in a dynamic and professional setting tailored to executives and engineers working in and for the MEMS industry. Milan will definitively be the city to visit in 2015 with the European MEMS Summit and the Universal Exposition taking place in the capital of Lombardi.

Rudolph Technologies, Inc. announced today that the MEMS company, Robert Bosch GmbH, has selected Rudolph to supply several different configurations of its F30 Inspection System for various steps in the front- and back-end fabrication processes of micro electrical mechanical systems (MEMS) devices. This win represents increasing business with tools beginning to ship in the second quarter 2015.

“We are thrilled that Bosch selected Rudolph’s inspection solutions for a variety of critical consumer goods and automotive applications,” said Mike Goodrich, vice president and general manager of Rudolph’s Inspection Business Unit. “The configurability of one base tool paired with a variety of high volume manufacturing (HVM)-proven handling options provides Bosch with the flexibility to apply these tools across numerous applications, improving overall tool utilization. Bosch’s challenge was handling the wide variety of substrates used in complex MEMS processes and we were able to meet their needs, providing handling solutions for frameless, ultrathin, film-frame and thicker non-traditional substrates.”

The MEMS industry is expanding, according to Yole Développement, and Bosch has experienced noteworthy growth in the past years. Zero defects is critical for the MEMS application of automotive sensors. The F30 system’s high speed and high sensitivity give the ability to free up expensive micro tools and focus on throughput and sampling inspection.

“A critical deciding factor for Bosch was the fact that Rudolph goes beyond traditional inspection by not only detecting defects but automatically classifying data so customers can quickly eliminate the source of the defect,” Goodrich added. “Our integrated software solutions will help Bosch meet the stringent automotive quality standards by enabling full characterization of the inspection data, resulting in high productivity and demonstrable quality.”

“It is rewarding to see that our customers value the R&D investments we made to elevate the value of our inspection solutions,” said Mike Plisinski, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Rudolph. “We see an increased demand for more intelligent process control solutions as pressure on quality and time-to-market continue to increase for our customers.”

Related news:

2014 top MEMS players ranking: Rising of the first MEMS titan

Growing in maturity, the MEMS industry gets its second wind

From connectivity to globalization and sustainability, the “Law” created by Gordon Moore’s prediction for the pace of semiconductor technology advances has set the stage for global technology innovation and contribution for 50 years. The exponential advances predicted by Moore’s Law have transformed the world we live in. The ongoing innovation, invention and investment in technology and the effects that arise from it are likely to enable continued advances along this same path in the future, according to a new report from IHS Inc. Titled “Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Moore’s Law,” the report describes how the activity predicted by Moore’s Law not only drives technological change, but has also created huge economic value and driven social advancement.

In April of 1965, Fairchild Semiconductor’s Research and Development Director, Gordon Moore, who later founded Intel, penned an article that led with the observation that transistors would decrease in cost and increase in performance at an exponential rate. More specifically, Moore posited that the quantity of transistors that can be incorporated into a single chip would approximately double every 18 to 24 months. This seminal observation was later dubbed “Moore’s Law.”

“Fifty years ago today, Moore defined the trajectory of the semiconductor industry, with profound consequences that continue to touch every aspect of our day-to-day lives,” said Dale Ford, vice president and chief analyst for IHS Technology. “In fact, Moore’s Law forecast a period of explosive growth in innovation that has transformed life as we know it.”

The IHS Technology report, which is available as a free download, finds that an estimated $3 trillion of additional value has been added to the global gross domestic product (GDP), plus another $9 trillion of indirect value in the last 20 years, due to the pace of innovation predicted by Moore’s Law. The total value is more than the combined GDP of France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

If the cadence of Moore’s Law had slowed to every three years, rather than two years, technology would have only advanced to 1998 levels: smart phones would be nine years away, the commercial Internet in its infancy (five years old) and social media would not yet have skyrocketed.

“Moore’s Law has proven to be the most effective predictive tool of the last half-century of technological innovation, economic advancement, and by association, social and cultural change,” Ford said. “It has implications for connectivity and the way we interact, as evidenced by the way social relationships now span the globe. It also provides insight into globalization and economic growth, as technology continues to transform entire industries and economies. Finally it reveals the importance of how sustainability affects life on Earth, as we continue to transform our physical world in both positive and negative ways.”

Moores Law full

The Moore’s Law Era: Explosive Economic and Societal Change

The consequences of Moore’s Law has fueled multifactor productivity growth. The activity forecast by the law has contributed a full percentage point to real GDP growth, including both direct and indirect impact, every year between 1995 and 2011, representing 37 percent of global economic impact.

“Not even Gordon Moore himself predicted the blistering pace of change for the modern world,” Ford said. “While it is true most people have never seen a microprocessor, every day we benefit from experiences that are all made possible by the exponential growth in technologies that underpin modern life.”

According to the “Moore’s Law Impact Report,” the repercussions of Moore’s Law have contributed to an improved quality of life, because of the advances made possible in healthcare, sustainability and other industries. The results of advanced digital technology include the following:

  • Forty percent of the world’s households now have high-speed connections, compared to less than 0.1 percent in 1991
  • Up to 150 billion incremental barrels of oil could potentially be extracted from discovered global oil fields
  • Researchers can perform 1.5 million high-speed screening tests per week (up from 180 in 1997), allowing for the development of new material, such as bio-fuels and feedstock’s for plant-based chemicals

Moore’s Law: Reflecting the Pace of Change

Moore’s Law is not a law but an unspoken agreement between the electronics industry and the world economy that inspires engineers, inventors and entrepreneurs to think about what may be possible.

“Whatever has been done, can be outdone,” said Gordon Moore. “The industry has been phenomenally creative in continuing to increase the complexity of chips. It’s hard to believe – at least it’s hard for me to believe – that now we talk in terms of billions of transistors on a chip rather than tens, hundreds or thousands.”

Moore’s observation has transformed computing from a rare, expensive capability into an affordable, pervasive and powerful force – the foundation for Internet, social media, modern data analytics and more. “Moore’s Law has helped inspire invention, giving the world more powerful computers and devices that enable us to connect to each other, to be creative, to be productive, to learn and stay informed, to manage health and finances, and to be entertained,” Ford said.

Millennials: The Stewards of Moore’s Law

From the changing shape and feel of how humans communicate to the delivery of healthcare, changing modes of transportation, cities of the future, harvesting energy resources, classroom learning and more – technology innovations that spring from Moore’s Law likely will remain a foundational force for growth into the next decade.

From data sharing, self-driving cars and drones to smart cities, smart homes and smart agriculture, Moore’s Law will enable people to continuously shrink technology and make it more power efficient, allowing creators, engineers and makers to rethink where – and in what situations – computing is possible and desirable.

Computing may disappear into the objects and spaces that we interact with – even the fabric of our clothes or ingestible tracking devices in our bodies. New devices may be created with powerful, inexpensive technology and combining this with the ability to pool and share more information, new experiences become possible.

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.56 billion in orders worldwide in May 2015 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.99, according to the May EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.   A book-to-bill of 0.99 means that $99 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.

SEMI reports that the three-month average of worldwide bookings in May 2015 was $1.56 billion. The bookings figure is 0.8 percent lower than the final April 2015 level of $1.57 billion, and is 11.0 percent higher than the May 2014 order level of $1.41 billion.

The three-month average of worldwide billings in May 2015 was $1.57 billion. The billings figure is 3.7 percent higher than the final April 2015 level of $1.51 billion, and is 11.6 percent higher than the May 2014 billings level of $1.41 billion.

“The May book-to-bill ratio slipped below parity as billings improved and bookings dipped slightly from April’s values,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI.  “Compared to one year ago, both bookings and billings continue to trend at higher levels.”

The SEMI book-to-bill is a ratio of three-month moving averages of worldwide bookings and billings for North American-based semiconductor equipment manufacturers. Billings and bookings figures are in millions of U.S. dollars.

Billings
(3-mo. avg)

Bookings
(3-mo. avg)

Book-to-Bill
December 2014 

$1,395.9

$1,381.5

0.99
January 2015 

$1,279.1

$1,325.6

1.04
February 2015 

$1,280.1

$1,313.7

1.03
March 2015 

$1,265.6

$1,392.7

1.10
April 2015 (final)

$1,515.3

$1,573.7

1.04
May 2015 (prelim)

$1,571.2

$1,561.4

0.99

Source: SEMI (www.semi.org), June 2015