Category Archives: MEMS

By Pete Singer

Many new innovations were discussed at imec’s U.S. International Technology Forum (ITF) on Monday at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, sub-3nm logic, memory computing, solid-state batteries, EUV, RF and photonics, but perhaps the most interesting was new technology that enables human cells, tissues and organs to be grown and analyzed on-chip.

After an introduction by SEMI President Ajit Monacha – who said he believes the semiconductor industry will reach $1 trillion in market size by 2030 (“there’s no shortage of killer applications,” he said) — Luc Van den hove, president and CEO of imec, kicked off the afternoon session speaking about many projects underway that bring leading microelectronics technologies to bear on today’s looming healthcare crisis. “We all live longer than ever before and that’s fantastic,” he said. “But by living longer we also spend a longer part of our life being ill. What we need is a shift from extending lifespan to extending healthspan. What we need is to find ways to cure and prevent some of these diseases like cancer, like heart diseases and especially dementia.”

Today, drug development is so time-consuming and costly, is because of the insufficiency of the existing methodologies for drug screening assays. These current assays are based on poor cell models that limit the quality of the resulting data, and result in inadequate biological relevance. Additionally, there is a lack of spatial resolution of the assays, resulting in the inability to screen single cells in a cell culture. “It is rather slow, it is quite labor intensive and it provides limited information,” Van den hove said. “With our semiconductor platform we have developed recently a multi-electrode array (MEA) chip on which we can grow cells, in which we can grow tissue and organs. We can monitor processes that are happening within the cells or between the cells during massive drug testing.”

The MEA (see Figure) packs 16,384 electrodes, distributed over 16 wells, and offers multiparametric analysis. Each of the 1,024 electrodes in a well can detect intracellular action potentials, aside from the traditional extracellular signals. Further, imec’s chip is patterned with microstructures to allow for a structured cell growth mimicking a specific organ.

A novel organ-on-chip platform for pharmacological studies with unprecedented signal quality. It fuses imec’s high-density multi-electrode array (MEA)-chip with a microfluidic well plate, developed in collaboration with Micronit Microtechnologies, in which cells can be cultured, providing an environment that mimics human physiology.

Earlier this year, in May at imec’s ITF forum in Europe, Veerle Reumers, project leader at imec, explained how the MEA works: “By using grooves, heart cells can for example grow into a more heart-like tissue. In this way, we fabricate miniature hearts-on-a-chip, making it possible to test the effect of drugs in a more biologically relevant context. Imec’s organ-on-chip platform is the first system that enables on-chip multi-well assays, which means that you can perform different experiments or – in other words – analyze different compounds, in parallel on a single chip,” he explained. “This is a considerable increase in throughput compared to current single-well MEAs and we aim to further increase the throughput by adding more wells in a system.”

Van den hove said they have been testing the chip. “The beauty of the semiconductor platform is that we can, because of the miniaturization capability, parallelize an enormous amount of this testing and accelerate drug testing. We can measure what we never measured before, at speeds that you couldn’t think of before.”

He added that imec recently embarked on a new initiative aimed to cure dementia called Mission Lucidity. “Together with some of our clinical biomedical research teams, we are on a mission to decode dementia, to develop a cure to prevent this disease,” he said.

The MEA will be one tool used in the initiative, but also coming into play will be the groups neuroprobes — which Van den hove said are among the world’s most advanced probes and are being used by nearly all the leading neuroscience research teams – along with next generation wearables. “By combining these tools, we want to better understand the processes that are happening in the brain. We can measure those processes with much higher resolution than what could be done before. This may be able to detect the onset disease earlier on. By administering the right medication earlier, we hope to be able to prevent the disease from further progressing,” he said.

BY PAUL VAN DER HEIDE, director of materials and components analysis, imec, Leuven, Belgium

To keep up with Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry continues to push the envelope in developing new device architectures containing novel materials. This in turn pushes the need for new solid-state analytical capabilities, whether for materials characterization or inline metrology. Aside from basic R&D, these capabilities are established at critical points of the semiconductor device manufacturing line, to measure, for example, the thickness and composition of a thin film, dopant profiles of transistor’s source/drain regions, the nature of defects on a wafer’s surface, etc. This approach is used to reduce “time to data”. We cannot wait until the end of the manufacturing line to know if a device will be functional or not. Every process step costs money and a fully functional device can take months to fabricate. Recent advances in instrumentation and computational power have opened the door to many new, exciting analytical possibilities.

One example that comes to mind concerns the development of coherent sources. So far, coherent photon sources have been used for probing the atomic and electronic structure of materials, but only within large, dedicated synchrotron radiation facilities. Through recent developments, table top coherent photon sources have been introduced that could soon see demand in the semiconductor lab/fab environment.

The increased computational power now at our finger tips is also allowing us to make the most of these and other sources through imaging techniques such as ptychography. Ptychog- raphy allows for the complex patterns resulting from coherent electron or photon interaction with a sample to be processed into recognizable images to a resolution close to the sources wavelength without the requirement of lenses (lenses tend to introduce aberrations). Potential application areas extend from non-destructive imaging of surface and subsurface structures, to probing chemical reactions at sub femto-second timescales.

Detector developments are also benefiting many analytical techniques presently used. As an example, transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) can now image, with atomic resolution, heavy as well as light elements. Combining this with increased computational power, allows for further devel- opment of imaging approaches such as tomography, holography, ptychography, differential phase contrast imaging, etc. All of which allow TEM/STEM to not only look at atoms in e.g. 2D materials such as MoS2 in far greater detail, but also opens the possibility to map electric fields and magnetic domains to unprecedented resolution.

The semiconductor industry is evolving at a very rapid pace. Since the beginning of the 21st century, we have seen numerous disruptive technologies emerge; technologies that need to serve is an increasingly fragmented applications space. It’s no longer solely about ‘the central processing unit (CPU)’. Other applications ranging from the internet of things, autonomous vehicles, wearable human-electronics interface, etc., are being pursued, each coming with unique requirements and analytical needs.

Looking ten to fifteen years ahead, we will witness a different landscape. Although I’m sure that existing techniques such as TEM/STEM will still be heavily used – probably more so than we realize now (we are already seeing TEM/STEM being extended into the fab). We will also see developments that will push the boundaries of what is possible. This would range from the increased use of hybrid metrology (combining results from multiple different analytical techniques and process steps) to the development of new innovative approaches.

To illustrate the latter, I take the example of secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS). With SIMS, an energetic ion beam is directed at the solid sample of interest, causing atoms in the near surface region to leave this surface. A small percentage of them are ionized, and pass through a mass spectrometer which separates the ions from one another according to their mass to charge ratio. When this is done in the dynamic-SIMS mode, a depth profile of the sample’s composition can be derived. Today, with this technique, we can’t focus the incoming energetic ion beam into a confined volume, i.e. onto a spot that approaches the size of a transistor. But at imec, novel concepts were intro- duced, resulting in what are called 1.5D SIMS and self-focusing SIMS (SF-SIMS). These approaches are based on the detection of constituents within repeatable array structures, giving averaged and statistically significant information. This way, the spatial resolution limit of SIMS was overcome.

And there are exciting developments occurring here at imec in other analytical fields such as atom probe tomography (APT), photoelectron spectroscopy (PES), Raman spectroscopy, Rutherford back scattering (RBS), scanning probe microscopy (SPM), etc. One important milestone has been the development of Fast Fourier Transform-SSRM (FFT-SSRM) at imec. This allows one to measure carrier distributions in FinFETs to unparalleled sensitivity.

Yet, probably the biggest challenge materials characterization and inline metrology face over the next ten to fifteen years will be how to keep costs down. Today, we make use of highly specialized techniques developed on mutually exclusive and costly platforms. But why not make use of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) that could simultaneously perform analysis in a highly parallel fashion, and perhaps even in situ? One can imagine scenarios in which an army of such units could scan an entire wafer in the fraction of the time it takes now, or alternatively, the incorporation of such units into wafer test structure regions.

BY PETE SINGER

There’s an old proverb that the shoemaker’s children always go barefoot, indicating how some professionals don’t apply their skills for themselves. Until lately, that has seemed the case with the semiconductor manufacturing industry which has been good at collecting massive amounts of data, but no so good at analyzing that data and using it to improve efficiency, boost yield and reduce costs. In short, the industry could be making better use of the technology it has developed.

That’s now changing, thanks to a worldwide focus on Industry 4.0–more commonly known as “smart manufacturing” in the U.S. – which represents a new approach to automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things, cloud computing, cognitive computing and the use of artificial intelligence/deep learning.

At SEMICON West this year, these trends will be showcased in a new Smart Manufacturing Pavilion where you’ll be able to see – and experience – data-sharing breakthroughs that are creating smarter manufacturing processes, increasing yields and profits, and spurring innovation across the industry. Each machine along the Pavilion’s multi-step line is displayed, virtually or with actual equipment on the floor – from design and materials through front-end patterning, to packaging and test to final board and system assembly.

In preparation for the show, I had the opportunity to talk to Mike Plisinski, CEO of Rudolph Technologies, the sponsor of the Smart Pavilion about smart manufacturing. He said in the past “the industry got very good at collecting a lot of data. We sensors on all kinds of tools and equipment and we’d track it with the idea of being able to do predictive maintenance or predictive analytics. That I think had minimal success,” he said.

What’s different now? “With the industry consolidating and the supply chains and products getting more complex that’s created the need to go beyond what existed. What was inhibiting that in the past was really the ability to align this huge volume of data,” he said. The next evolution is driven by the need to improve the processes. “As we’ve gone down into sub-20 nanometer, the interactions between the process steps are more complex, there’s more interaction, so understanding that interaction requires aligning digital threads and data streams.” If a process chamber changed temperature by 0.1°C, for example, what impact did it have on lithography process by x, y, z CD control. That’s the level of detail that’s required.

“That has been a significant challenge and that’s one of the areas that we’ve focused on over the last four, five years — to provide that kind of data alignment across the systems,” Plisinski said.

Every company is different, of course, and some have been managing this more effectively than others, but the cobbler’s children are finally getting new shoes.

By Dave Lammers

The semiconductor industry is collecting massive amounts of data from fab equipment and other sources. But is the trend toward using that data in a Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0 approach happening fast enough in what Mike Plisinski, CEO of Rudolph Technologies, calls a “very conservative” chip manufacturing sector?

“There are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around now, and much of it has existed for a long time with APC, FDC, and other existing capabilities. What was inhibiting the industry in the past was the ability to align this huge volume of data,” Plisinskisaid.

While the industry became successful at adding sensors to tools and collecting data, the ability to track that data and make use of it in predictive maintenance or other analytics thus far “has had minimal success,” he said. With fab processes and manufacturing supply chains getting more complex, customers are trying to figure out how to move beyond implementing statistical process control (SPC) on data streams.

What is the next step? Plisinski said now that individual processes are well understood, the next phase is data alignment across the fab’s systems. As control of leading-edge processes becomes more challenging, customers realize that the interactions between the process steps must be understood more deeply.

“Understanding these interactions requires aligning these digital threads and data streams. When a customer understands that when a chamber changes temperature by point one degrees Celsius, it impacts the critical dimensions of the lithography process by X, Y, and Z. Understanding those interactions has been a significant challenge and is an area that we have focused on from a variety of angles over the last five years,” Plisinski said.

Rudolph engineers have worked to integrate multiple data threads (see Figure), aligning various forms of data into one database for analysis by Rudolph’s Yield Management System (YMS). “For a number of years we’ve been able to align data. The limitation was in the database: the data storage, the speed of retrieval and analysis were limitations. Recently new types of databases have come out, so that instead of relational, columnar-type databases, the new databases have been perfect for factory data analysis, for streaming data. That’s been a huge enabler for the industry,” he said.

Rudolph engineers have worked to integrate multiple data threads into one database.

Leveraging AI’s capabilities

A decade ago, Rudolph launched an early neural-network based system designed to help customers optimize yields. The software analyzed data from across a fab to learn from variations in the data.

“The problem back then was that neural networks of this kind used non-linear math that was too new for our conservative industry, an industry accustomed to first principle analytics. As artificial intelligence has been used in other industries, AI is becoming more accepted worldwide, and our industry is also looking at ways to leverage some of the capabilities of artificial intelligence,” he said.

Collecting and making use of data with a fab is “no small feat,” Plisinskisaid, but that leads to sharing and aligning data across the value chain: the wafer fab, packaging and assembly, and others.

“To gain increased insights from the data streams or digital threads, to bring these threads all together and make sense of all of it. It is what I call weaving a fabric of knowledge: taking individual data threads, bringing them together, and weaving a much clearer picture of what’s going on.”

Security concerns run deep

One of the biggest challenges is how to securely transfer data between the different factories that make up the supply chain. “Even if they are owned by one entity, transferring that large volume of data, even if it’s over a private dedicated network, is a big challenge. If you start to pick and choose to summarize the data, you are losing some of the benefit. Finding that balance is important.”

The semiconductor industry is gaining insights from companies analyzing, for instance, streaming video. The network infrastructures, compression algorithms, transfers of information from mobile wireless devices, and other technologies are making it easier to connect semiconductor fabs.

“Security is perhaps the biggest challenge. It’s a mental challenge as much as a technical one, and by that I mean there is more than reluctance, there’s a fundamental disdain for letting the data out of a factory, for even letting data into the factory,” he said.

Within fabs, there is a tug of war between equipment vendors which want to own the data and provide value-add services, and customers who argue that since they own the tools they own the data. The contentious debate grows more intense when vendors talk about taking data out of the fab. “That’s one of the challenges that the industry has to work on — the concerns around security and competitive information getting leaked out.” Developing a front-end process is “a multibillion dollar bet, and if that data leaks out it can be devastating to market-share leadership,” Plisinski said.

Early adopter stories

The challenge facing Rudolph and other companies is to convince their customers of the value of sharing data; that “the benefits will outweigh their concerns. Thus far, the proof of the benefit has been somewhat limited.”

“At least from a Rudolph perspective, we’ve had some early adopters that have seen some significant benefits. And I think as those stories get out there and as we start to highlight what some of these early adopters have seen, others at the executive level in these companies will start to question their teams about some of their assumptions and concerns. Eventually I think we’ll find a way forward. But right now that’s a significant challenge,”Plisinski said.

It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem, making it harder to get beyond theories to case-study benefits. “What helped us is that some of the early adopters had complete control of their entire value chain. They were fully integrated. And so we were able to get over the concerns about data sharing and focus on the technical challenges of transferring all that data and centralizing it in one place for analytical purposes. From there we got to see the benefits and document them in a way that we could share with others, while protecting IP.”

Aggregating data, buying databases and analytical software, building algorithms – all cost money, in most cases adding up to millions of dollars. But if yields improve by .25 or half a percent, the payback comes in six to eight months, he said.

“It’s a very conservative industry, an applied science type of industry. Trying to prove the value of software — a kind of black magic exercise — has always been difficult. But as the industry’s problems have become so complex, it is requiring these sophisticated software solutions.”

“We will have examples of successful case studies in our booth during SEMICON West. Anyone wanting further information is invited to stop by and talk to our experts,” adds Plisinski.

BY GRIGORI BOKERIA, MATTHIAS FRAHM, SASCHA RAHMAN, and XI BING ANG, Simon-Kucher

The semiconductor industry is facing key challenges. In recent years, M&A mega deals have led to consolidations within the market, while the industry continues to mature. This leaves rather moderate growth prospects for the next three years. Semiconductor companies will have to consistently farm limited organic growth sources whilst at the same time tapping into new and growing macrotrends. To be successful in the long term, they must recognize the potential of the disruptive technologies and new markets that the Internet of Things will bring.

How can companies relive the previous successes in the mobile consumer segment?

In the 1990s and even early 2000s, growth booms in the industry with annual sales growth of 30 to 40 percent were the norm. Thanks to the sharply increasing demand in the consumer market for PCs, laptops and mobile phones, many smaller technology companies were able to grow into giants in the semiconductor business (FIGURE 1). However, since 2011, the industry has had to manage its growth expectations for the consumer market. With an average annual growth rate of 3.4 percent expected from 2015 to 2020, the strong growth period seems to be over and the dynamic start-up atmosphere of the past appears to be more or less history. The entire industry already has a market size of over 350 billion euros, with intense rigid competition among existing players. M&A mega deals (FIGURE 2) such as Qualcomm-NXP, Avago-Broadcom, Softbank-ARM and Western Digital-SanDisk have severely consolidated the market and now these companies are deep in operations integration and rationalization mode.

Is this the end of the period of constant growth outperformance? Not at all. Simon-Kucher project experience tells us that even organic growth sources based on dynamic market trends can be tapped, meaning companies can relive the successes in the mobile consumer sector. However, two fundamental strategic questions need to be answered: Where will these new growth waves come from?

And how can the imminent stagnation be avoided? We have identified three sources of organic growth that will play a pivotal role in the future of the semiconductor industry.

1.Exploit new disruptive technologies such as silicon carbide

Semiconductors based on silicon carbide (SiC) represent a strong area for future growth. Compared to semiconductors made of regular silicon, SiC-based semiconductors can operate at much higher frequency and temperature and convert electric power at lower losses, promising increased speed, robustness and efficiency. SiC devices are capable of managing the same power level as Si devices at half the size, boosting power density and reliability.

While a handful of players have already secured a favorable starting position in the market, there continues to be strong medium-term growth forecasts which means that the current market volume in this emerging product segment (~$200 million) still offers attractive entry potential for second and third movers. Several suppliers such as Dow Corning and Nippon Steel have entered and increased activity in the SiC market while companies such as Wolfspeed/Cree are experiencing decline in market share. This goes to show that there is still room to wrangle for territory.

We anticipate that hype will become mass reality within the next five to eight years, particularly driven by the growing demand in hybrid and electric mobility, regener- ative power generation and industrial applications. Notably, SiC may have a huge impact on the automotive industry, in particular on electric vehicles and e-mobility due to the high efficiency levels. In each of these markets, customers continue to demand and expect smaller wafers and devices with increasingly better performance profiles than Si-based devices, made possible by SiC technology. According to a recent Simon-Kucher study, global demand in the SiC technology segment and its sister technology gallium nitride (GaN) will amount to more than three billion euros by 2025, with double-digit annual growth rates. Industry analysts note that SiC has gradually emerged as “mainstream” material since 2016 which will result in drop in prices for devices from 2018 onwards. This would translate to possibly large increases in volume demand.

At the moment, the technology is still relatively cost-intensive and more complex in production primarily due to lack of scale. As such, SiC and GaN remain niche markets for now. However, having achieved first significant design-wins, first-moving companies are proof of the future market potential. The remaining semiconductor companies need to adapt their innovation strategies or risk trailing the pack. To successfully implement SiC and GaN system solutions, it is essential to closely orient new product development towards emerging market needs, starting from initial development phases.

Here, semiconductor companies have to identify the appli- cations where customers already demand high switching voltage and speed, low switching losses, and a small size and weight. Only in doing so can they expect customer- oriented market success from design-in to design-win.

2. Anticipate and seize new markets materializing from the Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) has now become the catch-all phrase that encapsulates an enormous spectrum of potential applications and markets revolving around interconnected physical devices and appliances. As it continues to evolve and numerous markets around it become commercially viable, semiconductor companies have a huge opportunity to capture the underlying profit pools. By some accounts, something like 3 billion new IoT-enabled devices are manufactured per year; at the most rudimentary level, each of these devices require microcontrollers, sensors, actuators and a whole host of other semiconductor-enabled parts. Another indirect area of growth for semiconductor companies will likely emerge from the fact that the exponentially increasing amount of data generated by IoT products need to be processed and stored. This will lead to demand for more server farms and greater storage capacities.

IoT products and applications would not be possible without the continued advancements in semiconductor technology, and the demand for inexpensive chips that can be mass- produced will only continue to increase. Rather than spectating and reacting to this market macrotrend from the sidelines, semiconductor companies should see the IoT as an integral part of the future market’s DNA.

The current challenge is the fragmented nature of the market, with no clear “killer application” or common platform; rather, there is a multitude of smaller niche opportunities that in its entirety promise overall attractive growth potential. No player has yet been able to establish a market-dominant position in this highly diversified market. There are, however, specific end-markets that have taken the lead (for now) in terms of showing promise of growth, such as smart home applications, consumer wearables (e.g. fitness bracelets, smart watches), medical electronics, and connected cars (FIGURE 3). The IoT will turn these individual niche segments into potential game-changers for the semiconductor industry.

Amid these fast-evolving segments, critical for the success of semiconductor companies is their agility in swiftly responding to emerging trends and integrating hardware and software components along the value chain and ultimately, offering a seamless IoT solution. Semiconductor companies already focusing on seamless security, communication intel- ligence and user-friendliness are a step ahead in strength- ening their position. To not be left behind, semiconductor companies need to make the strategic decision of prioritising resources and investments into IoT-related growth sources and resist the inertia and temptation to solely rely on existing “bread and butter” revenue streams, regardless of how healthy the current margins are. Related to this, to get serious about this emerging opportunity, semiconductor companies should not view the IoT markets as a nebulous concept with opportunistic revenue streams, but rather conduct in-depth analyses of their current position within the changing value chains and competitive landscape to formulate concrete go-to-market plans.

3. Shift from component-centric sales to supplying system solutions

Finally, a third dimension of growth beyond new products and new markets for semiconductor companies is to move up the value chain. Increasingly, leading market players are integrating chips, drivers, software and sensors to offer partial system solutions, with the ultimate objective of being ecosystem enablers. Naturally, this requires the capability to not only sell hardware (semiconductors, wafers, etc.) but an entire system and services around it that several entities from different industries can utilise to establish their own IoT products. However, for companies traditionally built around selling components, doing this successfully is not a straightforward undertaking. Many sales forces are finding themselves lacking the organizational setup and solution-selling approach critical for success. In addition, in order to integrate products in the portfolio into systems solutions, companies have to establish effective cross-industry channel management on the sales front and at the same time develop strong alliances with partners along the value chain to ensure a stable ecosystem. Successful players will be those in the market with the capability to provide modular solutions that can readily interlink products with security, software and system consulting services.

As a result, we believe that the desire of companies to move towards being system suppliers and ecosystem enablers will further increase M&A activity due to the need to acquire specialised knowledge. Notably, Intel has acquired three companies within the space of a year from different parts of the industry to assimilate specific expertise related to IoT i.e. Altera (designer and manufacturer of program- mable logic devices), Nervana Systems (artificial intelligence software developer) and Itseez (specialist in computer vision technology and algorithms).

In summary, despite some notions otherwise, we are bullish about the imminent growth potential in the semiconductor market driven by very powerful macrotrends in product technology, emerging applications and also value chain shifts. Semiconductor companies thirsty for new waves of exponential growth would do well to heed the signposts from these trends and re-orient their product development, industry alliances and sales approaches rapidly in order to capitalise on these opportunities before the winner takes all.

Grigori Bokeria is a Partner in Simon-Kucher’s Cologne office, where Sascha Rahman is a Director; Matthias Frahm is a Senior Director in the Bonn office and Xi Bing Ang is a Director based in the London office. All four authors work within Simon-Kucher’s Global Technology & Industrial practice.

Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy. It regularly happens in your toaster, that is, if you make toast regularly. The opposite, converting heat into electrical power, isn’t so easy.

Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories have developed a tiny silicon-based device that can harness what was previously called waste heat and turn it into DC power. Their advance was recently published in Physical Review Applied.

This tiny silicon-based device developed at Sandia National Laboratories can catch and convert waste heat into electrical power. The rectenna, short for rectifying antenna, is made of common aluminum, silicon and silicon dioxide using standard processes from the integrated circuit industry. Credit: Photo by Randy Montoya/Sandia National Laboratories

“We have developed a new method for essentially recovering energy from waste heat. Car engines produce a lot of heat and that heat is just waste, right? So imagine if you could convert that engine heat into electrical power for a hybrid car. This is the first step in that direction, but much more work needs to be done,” said Paul Davids, a physicist and the principal investigator for the study.

“In the short term we’re looking to make a compact infrared power supply, perhaps to replace radioisotope thermoelectric generators.” Called RTGs, the generators are used for such tasks as powering sensors for space missions that don’t get enough direct sunlight to power solar panels.

Davids’ device is made of common and abundant materials, such as aluminum, silicon and silicon dioxide — or glass — combined in very uncommon ways.

Silicon device catches, channels and converts heat into power

Smaller than a pinkie nail, the device is about 1/8 inch by 1/8 inch, half as thick as a dime and metallically shiny. The top is aluminum that is etched with stripes roughly 20 times smaller than the width of a human hair. This pattern, though far too small to be seen by eye, serves as an antenna to catch the infrared radiation.

Between the aluminum top and the silicon bottom is a very thin layer of silicon dioxide. This layer is about 20 silicon atoms thick, or 16,000 times thinner than a human hair. The patterned and etched aluminum antenna channels the infrared radiation into this thin layer.

The infrared radiation trapped in the silicon dioxide creates very fast electrical oscillations, about 50 trillion times a second. This pushes electrons back and forth between the aluminum and the silicon in an asymmetric manner. This process, called rectification, generates net DC electrical current.

The team calls its device an infrared rectenna, a portmanteau of rectifying antenna. It is a solid-state device with no moving parts to jam, bend or break, and doesn’t have to directly touch the heat source, which can cause thermal stress.

Infrared rectenna production uses common, scalable processes

Because the team makes the infrared rectenna with the same processes used by the integrated circuit industry, it’s readily scalable, said Joshua Shank, electrical engineer and the paper’s first author, who tested the devices and modeled the underlying physics while he was a Sandia postdoctoral fellow.

He added, “We’ve deliberately focused on common materials and processes that are scalable. In theory, any commercial integrated circuit fabrication facility could make these rectennas.”

That isn’t to say creating the current device was easy. Rob Jarecki, the fabrication engineer who led process development, said, “There’s immense complexity under the hood and the devices require all kinds of processing tricks to build them.”

One of the biggest fabrication challenges was inserting small amounts of other elements into the silicon, or doping it, so that it would reflect infrared light like a metal, said Jarecki. “Typically you don’t dope silicon to death, you don’t try to turn it into a metal, because you have metals for that. In this case we needed it doped as much as possible without wrecking the material.”

The devices were made at Sandia’s Microsystems Engineering, Science and Applications Complex. The team has been issued a patent for the infrared rectenna and have filed several additional patents.

The version of the infrared rectenna the team reported in Physical Review Applied produces 8 nanowatts of power per square centimeter from a specialized heat lamp at 840 degrees. For context, a typical solar-powered calculator uses about 5 microwatts, so they would need a sheet of infrared rectennas slightly larger than a standard piece of paper to power a calculator. So, the team has many ideas for future improvements to make the infrared rectenna more efficient.

Future work to improve infrared rectenna efficiency

These ideas include making the rectenna’s top pattern 2D x’s instead of 1D stripes, in order to absorb infrared light over all polarizations; redesigning the rectifying layer to be a full-wave rectifier instead of the current half-wave rectifier; and making the infrared rectenna on a thinner silicon wafer to minimize power loss due to resistance.

Through improved design and greater conversion efficiency, the power output per unit area will increase. Davids thinks that within five years, the infrared rectenna may be a good alternative to RTGs for compact power supplies.

Shank said, “We need to continue to improve in order to be comparable to RTGs, but the rectennas will be useful for any application where you need something to work reliably for a long time and where you can’t go in and just change the battery. However, we’re not going to be an alternative for solar panels as a source of grid-scale power, at least not in the near term.”

Davids added, “We’ve been whittling away at the problem and now we’re beginning to get to the point where we’re seeing relatively large gains in power conversion, and I think that there’s a path forward as an alternative to thermoelectrics. It feels good to get to this point. It would be great if we could scale it up and change the world.”

Today at its Imec Technology Forum USA in San Francisco, imec, the research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technology, announced that it has demonstrated ultra-low power, high-bandwidth optical transceivers through hybrid integration of Silicon Photonics and FinFET CMOS technologies. With a dynamic power consumption of only 230fJ/bit and a footprint of just 0.025mm2, the 40Gb/s non-return-to-zero optical transceivers mark an important milestone in realizing ultra-dense, multi-Tb/s optical I/O solutions for next-generation high-performance computing applications.

The exponentially growing demand for I/O bandwidth in datacenter switches and high-performance computing nodes is driving the need for tight co-integration of optical interconnects with advanced CMOS logic, covering a wide range of interconnect distances (1m-500m+). In the presented work, a differential FinFET driver was co-designed with a Silicon Photonics ring modulator, and achieved 40Gb/s NRZ optical modulation at 154fJ/bit dynamic power consumption. The receiver included a FinFET trans-impedance amplifier (TIA) optimized for operation with a Ge waveguide photodiode, enabling 40Gb/s NRZ photodetection with an estimated sensitivity of -10dBm at 75fJ/bit power consumption. High-quality data transmission and reception was also demonstrated in a loop-back experiment at 1330nm wavelength over standard single mode fiber (SMF) with 2dB link margin. Finally, a 4x40Gb/s, 0.1mm2wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmitter with integrated thermal control was demonstrated, enabling bandwidth scaling beyond 100Gb/s per fiber.

“The demonstrated hybrid FinFET-Silicon Photonics platform integrates high-performance 14nm FinFET CMOS circuits with imec’s 300mm Silicon Photonics technology through dense, low-capacitance Cu micro-bumps. Careful co-design in this combined platform has enabled us to demonstrate 40Gb/s NRZ optical transceivers with extremely low power consumption and high bandwidth density,” says Joris Van Campenhout, director of the Optical I/O R&D program at imec. “Through design optimizations, we expect to further improve the single-channel data rates to 56Gb/s NRZ. Combined with wavelength-division multiplexing, these transceivers provide a scaling path to ultra-compact, multi-Tb/s optical interconnects, which are essential for next-generation high-performance systems.”

This work has been carried out as part of imec’s industrial affiliation R&D program on Optical I/O and was presented at the 2018 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits (June 2018) in a “late news” paper. Imec’s 200mm and 300mm Silicon Photonics technologies are available for evaluation by companies and academia through imec’s prototyping service and the iSiPP50G multi-project wafer (MPW) service.

Smart technologies take center stage tomorrow as SEMICON West, the flagship U.S. event for connecting the electronics manufacturing supply chain, opens for three days of insights into leading technologies and applications that will power future industry expansion. Building on this year’s record-breaking industry growth, SEMICON West – July 10-12, 2018, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco – spotlights how cognitive learning technologies and other disruptors will transform industries and lives.

Themed BEYOND SMART and presented by SEMI, SEMICON West 2018 features top technologists and industry leaders highlighting the significance of artificial intelligence (AI) and the latest technologies and trends in smart transportation, smart manufacturing, smart medtech, smart data, big data, blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Seven keynotes and more than 250 subject matter experts will offer insights into critical opportunities and issues across the global microelectronics supply chain. The event also features new Smart Pavilions to showcase interactive technologies for immersive, virtual experiences.

Smart transportation and smart manufacturing pavilions: Applying AI to accelerate capabilities

Automotive leads all new applications in semiconductor growth and is a major demand driver for technologies inrelated segments such as MEMS and sensors. The SEMICON West Smart Transportation and Smart Manufacturing pavilions showcase AI breakthroughs that are enabling more intelligent transportation performance and manufacturing processes, increasing yields and profits, and spurring innovation across the industry.

Smart workforce pavilion: Connecting next-generation talent with the microelectronics industry

SEMICON West also tackles the vital industry issue of how to attract new talent with the skills to deliver future innovations. Reliant on a highly skilled workforce, the industry today faces thousands of job openings, fierce competition for workers and the need to strengthen its talent pipeline. Educational and engaging, the Smart Workforce Pavilion connects the microelectronics industry with college students and entry-level professionals.

In the Workforce Pavilion “Meet the Experts” Theater, recruiters from top companies are available for on-the-spot interviews, while career coaches offer mentoring, tips on cover letter and resume writing, job-search guidance, and more. SEMI will also host High Tech U (HTU) in conjunction with the SEMICON West Smart Workforce Pavilion. The highly interactive program supported by Advantest, Edwards, KLA-Tencor and TEL exposes high school students to STEM education pathways and useful insights about careers in the industry.

By integrating the design of antenna and electronics, researchers have boosted the energy and spectrum efficiency for a new class of millimeter wave transmitters, allowing improved modulation and reduced generation of waste heat. The result could be longer talk time and higher data rates in millimeter wave wireless communication devices for future 5G applications.

The new co-design technique allows simultaneous optimization of the millimeter wave antennas and electronics. The hybrid devices use conventional materials and integrated circuit (IC) technology, meaning no changes would be required to manufacture and package them. The co-design scheme allows fabrication of multiple transmitters and receivers on the same IC chip or the same package, potentially enabling multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems as well as boosting data rates and link diversity.

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology presented their proof-of-concept antenna-based outphasing transmitter on June 11 at the 2018 Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium (RFIC) in Philadelphia. Their other antenna-electronics co-design work was published at the 2017 and 2018 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and multiple peer-reviewed IEEE journals. The Intel Corporation and U.S. Army Research Office sponsored the research.

Georgia Tech researchers are shown with electronics equipment and antenna setup used to measure far-field radiated output signal from millimeter wave transmitters. Shown are Graduate Research Assistant Huy Thong Nguyen, Graduate Research Assistant Sensen Li, and Assistant Professor Hua Wang. (Credit: Allison Carter, Georgia Tech)

“In this proof-of-example, our electronics and antenna were designed so that they can work together to achieve a unique on-antenna outphasing active load modulation capability that significantly enhances the efficiency of the entire transmitter,” said Hua Wang, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This system could replace many types of transmitters in wireless mobile devices, base stations and infrastructure links in data centers.”

Key to the new design is maintaining a high-energy efficiency regardless whether the device is operating at its peak or average output power. The efficiency of most conventional transmitters is high only at the peak power but drops substantially at low power levels, resulting in low efficiency when amplifying complex spectrally efficient modulations. Moreover, conventional transmitters often add the outputs from multiple electronics using lossy power combiner circuits, exacerbating the efficiency degradation.

“We are combining the output power though a dual-feed loop antenna, and by doing so with our innovation in the antenna and electronics, we can substantially improve the energy efficiency,” said Wang, who is the Demetrius T. Paris Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  “The innovation in this particular design is to merge the antenna and electronics to achieve the so-called outphasing operation that dynamically modulates and optimizes the output voltages and currents of power transistors, so that the millimeter wave transmitter maintains a high energy efficiency both at the peak and average power.”

Beyond energy efficiency, the co-design also facilitates spectrum efficiency by allowing more complex modulation protocols. That will enable transmission of a higher data rate within the fixed spectrum allocation that poses a significant challenge for 5G systems.

“Within the same channel bandwidth, the proposed transmitter can transmit six to ten times higher data rate,” Wang said. “Integrating the antenna gives us more degrees of freedom to explore design innovation, something that could not be done before.”

Sensen Li, a Georgia Tech graduate research assistant who received the Best Student Paper Award at the 2018 RFIC symposium, said the innovation resulted from bringing together two disciplines that have traditionally worked separately.

“We are merging the technologies of electronics and antennas, bringing these two disciplines together to break through limits,” he said. “These improvements could not be achieved by working on them independently. By taking advantage of this new co-design concept, we can further improve the performance of future wireless transmitters.”

The new designs have been implemented in 45-nanometer CMOS SOI IC devices and flip-chip packaged on high-frequency laminate boards, where testing has confirmed a minimum two-fold increase in energy efficiency, Wang said.

The antenna electronics co-design is enabled by exploring the unique nature of multi-feed antennas.

“An antenna structure with multiple feeds allows us to use multiple electronics to drive the antenna concurrently. Different from conventional single-feed antennas, multi-feed antennas can serve not only as radiating elements, but they can also function as signal processing units that interface among multiple electronic circuits,” Wang explained. “This opens a completely new design paradigm to have different electronic circuits driving the antenna collectively with different but optimized signal conditions, achieving unprecedented energy efficiency, spectral efficiency and reconfigurability.”

The cross-disciplinary co-design could also facilitate fabrication and operation of multiple transmitters and receivers on the same chip, allowing hundreds or even thousands of elements to work together as a whole system. “In massive MIMO systems, we need to have a lot of transmitters and receivers, so energy efficiency will become even more important,” Wang noted.

Having large numbers of elements working together becomes more practical at millimeter wave frequencies because the wavelength reduction means elements can be placed closer together to achieve compact systems, he pointed out. These factors could pave the way for new types of beamforming that are essential in future millimeter wave 5G systems.

Power demands could drive adoption of the technology for battery-powered devices, but Wang says the technology could also be useful for grid-powered systems such as base stations or wireless connections to replace cables in large data centers. In those applications, expanding data rates and reducing cooling needs could make the new devices attractive.

“Higher energy efficiency also means less energy will be converted to heat that must be removed to satisfy the thermal management,” he said. “In large data centers, even a small reduction in thermal load per device can add up. We hope to simplify the thermal requirements of these electronic devices.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Taiyun Chi, Huy Thong Nguyen and Tzu-Yuan Huang, all from Georgia Tech.

The SiC power market is now on the road, asserts Yole Développement (Yole). Therefore, since 2017, the market research and strategy consulting company identified more than 20 strategic announcements, showing the dynamism of this market and attractiveness of the technology. Rohm, Bombardier, Cree, SDK, STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, Littelfuse, Ascatron and more are part of the powerful ecosystem, presenting innovative products and revealing key partnerships and/or M&A .

Today, SiC transistors are clearly being adopted, penetrating smoothly into different applications. Yole’s analysts forecast a US$1.4 billion SiC power semiconductor market by 2023. According to the Power & Wireless team at Yole, this market is showing a 29% CAGR between 2017 and 2023.
Power SiC report, 2018 edition presents Yole’s deep understanding of SiC penetration in different applications including xEV, xEV charging infrastructure, PFC/power supply, PV, UPS, motor drives, wind and rail. In addition, it highlights the state-of-the-art SiC-based devices, modules, and power stacks. Yole’s analysts also describe the SiC power industrial landscape from materials to systems, and analyze of SiC power market dynamics. This report proposes a detailed quantification of the SiC power device market until 2023, in value and volume.

SiC adoption is accelerating: is the supply chain ready? Yole’s analysts reveal today their vision of the SiC industry.

SiC market is still being driven by diodes used in PFC and PV applications. However Yole expects that in five years from now the main SiC device market driver will be transistors, with an impressive 50% CAGR for 2017-2023.

This adoption is partially thanks to the improvement of the transistor performance and reliability compared to the first generation of products, which gives confidence to customers for implementation.

Another key trend revealed by Yole’s analysts is the SiC adoption by automotive players, over the next 5-10 years. “Its implementation rate differs depending on where SiC is being used,” comments Dr. Hong Lin, Technology and Market Analyst, Compound Semiconductors at Yole. “That could be in the main inverter, in OBC or in the DC/DC converter. By 2018, more than 20 automotive companies are already using SiC SBDs or SiC MOSFET transistors for OBC, which will lead to 44% CAGR through to 2023.”

Yole expects SiC adoption in the main inverter by some pioneers, with an inspiring 108% market CAGR for 2017-2023. This will be possible because nearly all carmakers have projects to implement SiC in the main inverter in coming years. In particular, Chinese automotive players are strongly considering the adoption of SiC.

The recent SiC module developed by STMicroelectronics for Tesla and its Model 3 is a good example of this early adoption. The SiC-based inverter, analyzed by System Plus Consulting, Yole’s sister company is composed of 24 1-in-1 power modules. Each module contains two SiC MOSFETs with an innovative die attach solution and connected directly on the terminals with copper clips and thermally dissipated by copper baseplates. The thermal dissipation of the modules is performed thanks to a specifically designed pin-fin heatsink.

“SiC MOSFET is manufactured with the latest STMicroelectronics technology design,” explains Dr. Elena Barbarini, Head of Department Devices at System Plus Consulting. “This technical choice allows reduction of conduction losses and switching losses”. STMicroelectronics is strongly involved in the development of SiC-based modules for the automotive industry. During its recent Capital Markets Day, the leading player details its activities in this field (Source: Automotive & Discrete Group presentation – May 2018). STMicroelectronics is also commited in the development of innovative packaging solutions. . System Plus Consulting proposes today a complete teardown analysis including a detailed estimation of the production cost of the module and its package.

PV has also caught the attention of Yole’s analysts during recent months. China claimed almost the half of the world’s installations in the last year. However due to new governmental regulations, Yole sees a slow down of the PV market in short term and has lowered its expectation of SiC penetration for the segment.

In general, system manufacturers are interested in implementing cost effective systems which are reliable, without any technology choice, either silicon or SiC. “Today, even if it’s certified that SiC performs better than silicon, system manufacturers still get questions about long term reliability and the total cost of the SiC inverter”, comments Ana Villamor, Technology & Market Analyst, Power Electronics & Compound Semiconductors at Yole.

Yole and System Plus Consulting teams will attend SEMICON Europa 2018 (Munich, Germany – November 13-16). During the leading trade show, Dr. Milan Rosina, Senior Technology & Market Analyst, Power Electronics & Batteries at Yole proposes a dedicated WBG presentation on November 15 at 2:30 PM.

SiC and GaN devices have demonstrated their large potential for power electronic applications. During the presentation “GaN and SiC power device: market overview” taken place during the Power Electronics Session, Dr. Rosina proposes an overview of the market, technology and the industrial supply chain. More information available on i-micronews.com, Conferences & Trade Shows section.