Category Archives: MEMS

 IBM today announced the launch of a new community, IBM developerWorks Recipes, designed to help developers – from novice to experienced – quickly and easily learn how to connect Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the cloud and how to use data coming from those connected devices.

Users of developerWorks Recipes can tap into IBM’s platform-as-a-service, Bluemix, to implement step-by-step tutorials for embedding advanced analytics and machine learning into IoT devices and applications. Examples include:

  • Understanding vehicle performance by analyzing data from its On-Board Diagnostic system.
  • Linking real-time machine condition monitoring with IBM asset management to monitor everything from the health of household appliances to wheels on a railroad car.
  • Spotting trends and obtaining solutions to common problems through graphical representation of historical and real-time data from IoT devices.

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 4.9 billion connected things will be in use in 2015, up 30 percent from 2014, and will reach 25 billion by 2020.

By helping users connect their IoT devices to IBM Bluemix, which IBM launched in 2014 with a $1 billion investment and today has more than 100 open-source tools and services, users can then run advanced analytics, utilize machine learning and tap into additional Bluemix services. For example, data storage, predictive modeling and geospatial analytics can help users to better understand the data on their devices and also help to accelerate the IoT ecosystem.

“IBM has long been a leader in offering innovative tools for developers to create the applications of our future.  Now, IBM is expanding that focus so anyone — from the software novice to the experienced hardware engineer — can easily and quickly access materials providing guidance in the creation, management and connection of IoT devices to each other and the cloud,” said Christopher O’Connor, General Manager, Offerings, Internet of Things, IBM. “With developerWorks Recipes, IBM provides easy access to new analytics and operational insight capabilities that tap into the vast data from many connected devices, home appliances or cars.”

Developers and the IoT ecosystem are already taking advantage of the new IoT community from IBM:

“For years, companies have been building their machine-to-machine and IoT applications essentially from scratch. IBM developerWorks Recipes enables companies to leverage the hard lessons learned by other developers in order to simplify the process – a goal to which MultiTech has been committed for more than 40 years,” said Daniel Quant, Vice President of Product Management, MultiTech Systems. “IBM is helping to enable us and our customers to connect devices quickly and with security features to the IBM Cloud – with the ultimate goal of transforming our business processes and efficiencies.”

“Developers just can’t be experts on each new ‘thing’ that gets added to the IoT,” said Jone Rasmussen, General Manager of IoT developer tool startup Bitreactive. “To control costs of IoT projects, developers need easy, repeatable ways to quickly extract data from devices. IBM developerWorks Recipes is the perfect platform to do just that. It brings the embedded and cloud developer communities together in one place. Any cloud IoT developer can now easily find and reuse our templates for producing intelligent data at the edge of the network. With developerWorks Recipes, IBM shows it understands what’s needed to make developers’ lives easier.”

“The ecosystems around the IoT are complex and that complexity makes it more difficult for companies to get the true business benefits from IoT,” said Tony Milbourn, Vice President Corporate Strategy, u-blox. “To cut through this complexity, particularly in the Internet of Things that Really Matter, u-blox has combined its robust cellular, short-range and positioning products and solutions with IBM’s deep data analytics and management capabilities in IBM Bluemix cloud platform. developerWorks Recipes brings recipes, tools and prototypes that show customers the benefits, support ease of deployment, and most importantly provide information about how to best reduce risk.  The combination of IBM and u-blox is ideal for key global players in the automotive, industrial and professional markets.”

IBM developerWorks Recipes is currently open for anyone to take advantage of existing IoT content, create new content and share with the community: https://developer.ibm.com/recipes/

IC Insights’ new 185-page Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report, which will be released later this week, examines the recent surge of M&A activity, including China’s aggressive new programs aimed at bolstering its presence in the semiconductor industry.

It would be hard to characterize the huge wave of semiconductor mergers and acquisitions occurring in 2015 as anything but M&A mania, or even madness.  In just the first six months of 2015 alone, announced semiconductor acquisition agreements had a combined total value of $72.6 billion (Figure 1), which is nearly six times the annual average for M&A deals struck during the five previous years (2010-2014).

Figure 1

Figure 1

Three enormous acquisition agreements in 1H15 have already catapulted 2015 into the M&A record books.  First, NXP announced an agreement in March to buy Freescale for $11.8 billion in cash and stock.  In late May, Avago announced a deal to acquire Broadcom for about $37 billion in cash and stock, and then four days later (on June 1), Intel reported it had struck an agreement to buy Altera for $16.7 billion in cash.  Avago’s astonishing deal to buy Broadcom is by far the largest acquisition agreement ever reached in the IC industry.

In many ways, 2015 has become a perfect storm for acquisitions, mergers, and consolidation among major suppliers, which are seeing sales slow in their existing market segments and need to broaden their businesses to stay in favor with investors.  Rising costs of product development and advanced technologies are also driving the need to become bigger and grow sales at higher rates in the second half of this decade.  The emergence of the huge market potential for the Internet of Things (IoT) is causing major IC suppliers to reset their strategies and quickly fill in missing pieces in their product portfolios.  China’s ambitious goal to become self-sufficient in semiconductors and reduce imports of ICs from foreign suppliers has also launched a number of acquisitions by Chinese companies and investment groups.

IC Insights believes that the increasing number of mergers and acquisitions, leading to fewer major IC manufacturers and suppliers, is one of major changes in the supply base that illustrate the maturing of the industry.  In addition to the monstrous M&A wave currently taking place, trends such as the lack of any new entry points for startup IC manufacturers, the strong movement to the fab-lite business model, and the declining capex as a percent of sales ratio, all promise to dramatically reshape the semiconductor industry landscape over the next five years.

The term “plasmons” might sound like something from the soon-to-be-released new Star Wars movie, but the effects of plasmons have been known about for centuries. Plasmons are collective oscillations of conduction electrons (those loosely attached to molecules and atoms) that roll across the surfaces of metals while interacting with photons. For example, plasmons from nanoparticles of gold, silver and other metals interact with visible light photons to generate the vibrant colors displayed by stained glass, a technology that dates back more than 1,000 years. But plasmons have high-technology applications as well. In fact, there’s even an emerging technology named for them – plasmonics – that holds great promise for superfast computers and optical microscopy.

At the heart of the high-technology applications of plasmons is their unique ability to confine the energy of a photon into a spatial dimension smaller than the photon’s wavelength. Now, a team of researchers with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, working at the Advanced Light Source (ALS), has generated and detected plasmons that boast one of the strongest confinement factors ever: the plasmon wavelength is only one hundredth of the free-space photon wavelength.

By focusing infrared light onto the tip of an Atomic Force Microscope, the researchers were able to observe what are called “Luttinger-liquid” plasmons in metallic single-walled nanotubes. A Luttinger-liquid is the theory that describes the flow of electrons through one-dimensional objects, such as a single-walled nanotube (SWNT), much as the Fermi-liquid theory describes the flow of electrons through most two- and three-dimensional metals.

“It is amazing that a plasmon in an individual nanotube, a 1-D object barely a single nanometer in diameter, can even be observed at all,” says Feng Wang, a condensed matter physicist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division who led this work. “Our use of scattering-type scanning near-field optical microscopy (s-SNOM) is enabling us to study Luttinger-liquid physics and explore novel plasmonic devices with extraordinary sub-wavelength confinement, almost 100 million times smaller in volume than that of free-space photons. What we’re observing could hold great promise for novel plasmonic and nanophotonic devices over a broad frequency range, including telecom wavelengths.”

Wang, who also holds appointments with the University California (UC) Berkeley Physics Department and the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (Kavli-ENSI), is the corresponding author of a paper in Nature Photonics that describes this research. The paper is titled “Observation of a Luttinger-liquid plasmon in metallic single-walled carbon nanotubes.” The co-lead authors are Zhiwen Shi and Xiaoping Hong, both members of Wang’s UC Berkeley research group. Other co-authors are Hans Bechtel, Bo Zeng, Michael Martin, Kenji Watanabe, Takashi Taniguchi and Yuen-Ron Shen.

Despite the enormous potential of plasmons for the integration of nanoscale photonics and electronics, the development of nanophotonic circuits based on classical plasmons has been significantly hampered by the difficulty in achieving broadband plasmonic waveguides that simultaneously exhibit strong spatial confinement, a high quality factor and low dispersion. The observations of Wang and his colleagues demonstrate that Luttinger-liquid plasmon of 1-D conduction electrons in SWNTs behaves much differently from classical plasmons.

“Luttinger-liquid plasmons in SWNTs propagate at semi-quantized velocities that are independent of carrier concentration or excitation wavelength, and simultaneously exhibit extraordinary spatial confinement, a high quality factor and low dispersion,” says co-lead author Shi. “Usually, to be manipulated efficiently with a photonic device, the light wavelength is required to be smaller than the device. By concentrating photon energy at deep sub-wavelength scales, Luttinger-liquid plasmons in SWNTs effectively reduce the light wavelength. This should allow for the miniaturization of photonic devices down to the nanometer scale.”

Wang, Shi, Hong and their colleagues observed Luttinger-liquid plasmons using the s-SNOM setup at ALS Beamline 5.4.1. Metallic SWNTs with diameters ranging from 1.2 to 1.7 nanometers were grown, purified and then deposited on a boron nitride substrate. Single wavelength infrared light was focused onto the tip of an Atomic Force Microscope to excite and detect a plasmon wave along an SWNT.

“Our direct observation of Luttinger-liquid plasmons opens up exciting new opportunities,” Wang says. “For example, we’re now exploring these plasmons in telecom wavelengths, the most widely used in photonics and integrated optics. We’re also learning how the properties of these plasmons might be manipulated through electrostatic gating, mechanical strain and external magnetic fields.”

Within the photolithography equipment market reaching $150M in 2014, advanced packaging applications experienced the strongest growth. Yole Développement (Yole)estimates that more than 40 systems have been installed in 2014, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) representing 10 percent between 2014 and 2020. In the meanwhile, MEMS photolithography equipment looks set for 7 percent CAGR and LEDs 3 percent.

Yole released last month its technology & market analysis dedicated to the manufacturing process, photolithography. Under this analysis entitled “Photolithography Equipment & Materials for Advanced Packaging, MEMS and LED Applications”, the “More than Moore” market research and strategy consulting company proposes a comprehensive overview of the equipment and materials market dedicated to the photolithography step. Yole’s analysts performed a special focus on the advanced packaging area. They highlighted the following topics: current and emerging lithography technologies, technical specifications, challenges and technology trends, market forecast between 2014 and 2020, market shares and some case studies.

yole packaging july

“The advanced packaging market is very interesting and is growing dynamically as it includes many different players along the supply chain,” said Claire Troadec, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. It encompasses outsourced assembly at test firms (OSATs), integrated manufacturers (IDMs), MEMS foundries and mid-stage foundries.
In comparison, even if the MEMS & Sensors industry is growing at a fast pace, components are also experiencing die size reduction due to strong cost pressure in the consumer market. Consequently wafer shipments are not following the same trend as unit shipments. Lastly, LED equipment growth is back to a normal rhythm, after big investments made in recent years.

Advanced packaging has very complex technical specifications. Warpage handling as well as heterogeneous materials represent big challenges to photolithography. Due to aggressive resolution targets in advanced packaging, performance must be improved. The current minimum resolution required is below 5µm for some advanced packaging platforms, like 3D integrated circuits, 2.5D interposers, and wafer level chip scale packaging (WLCSP). A lot of effort is being made to reduce overlay issues due to shifting dies and obtain vertical sidewalls for flip-chip and WLCSP. Although steppers are already well established in the packaging field, new disruptive lithography technologies are also emerging and could contribute to market growth from 2015-2016.

“Huge business opportunities in the advanced packaging market are therefore driving photolithography equipment demand,” highlighted Amandine Pizzagalli, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole. “Given the high growth rate of this market, there is no doubt that already established photolithography players and new entrants will be attracted,” she added.

yole packaging july fig 2

By encoding information in photons via their spin, “photonic” computers could be orders of magnitude faster and efficient than their current-day counterparts. Likewise, encoding information in the spin of electrons, rather than just their quantity, could make “spintronic” computers with similar advantages.

University of Pennsylvania engineers and physicists have now discovered a property of silicon that combines aspects of all of these desirable qualities.

In a study published in Science, they have demonstrated a silicon-based photonic device that is sensitive to the spin of the photons in a laser shined on one of its electrodes. Light that is polarized clockwise causes current to flow in one direction, while counter-clockwise polarized light makes it flow in the other direction.

This property was hiding in plain sight; it is a function of the geometric relationship between the pattern of atoms on the surface of silicon nanowires and how electrodes placed on those wires intersect them. The interaction between the semiconducting silicon and the metallic electrodes produces an electric field at an angle that breaks the mirror symmetry that silicon typically exhibits. This chiral property is what sends electrons in one direction or the other down the nanowire depending on the polarity of the light that hits the electrodes.

The study was led by Ritesh Agarwal, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, and Sajal Dhara, a postdoctoral researcher in Agarwal’s lab. They collaborated with Eugene Mele, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in Penn’s School of Arts & Sciences.

“Whenever you change a symmetry, you can do new things,” said Agarwal. “In this case, we have demonstrated how to make a photodetector sensitive to a photon’s spin. All photonic computers need photodetectors, but they currently only use the quantity of photons to encode information. This sensitivity to photon spin would be an extra degree of freedom, meaning you could encode additional information on each photon.

“Typically, materials with heavy elements show this property due to their spins strongly interacting with electron’s orbital motion, but we have demonstrated this effect on the surface of silicon, originating only from the electron’s orbital motion”

Agarwal and Dhara reached out to Mele due to his work on topological insulators. He, along with fellow Penn physicist Charles Kane, laid the foundation for this new a class of materials, which are electrical insulators on their interiors but conduct electricity on their surfaces.

Agarwal’s group was working on various materials that exhibit topological effects, but as a check on their methods, Mele suggested trying their experiments with silicon as well. As a light, highly symmetric material, silicon was not thought to be able to exhibit these properties.

“We expected the control experiment to give a null result, instead we discovered something new about nanomaterials,” Mele said.

Silicon is the heart of computer industry, so finding ways of producing these types of effects in that element is preferable to learning how to work with the heavier, rarer elements that naturally exhibit them.

Once it was clear that silicon was capable of having chiral properties, the researchers set out to find out the atomic mechanisms behind it.

“The effect was coming from the surface of the nanowire,” Dhara said. “The way most silicon nanowires are grown, the atoms are bound in zigzag chains that go along the surface, not down into the wire.”

These zigzag patterns are such that placing a mirror on top of them would produce an image that could be superimposed on the original. This is why silicon is not intrinsically chiral. However, when metal electrodes are placed on the wire in the typical perpendicular fashion, they intersect the direction of the chains at a slight angle.

“When you have any metal and any semiconductor in contact, you’ll get an electric field at the interface, and it’s this field that is breaking the mirror symmetry in the silicon chains,” Dhara said.

Because the direction of the electric field does not exactly match the direction of the zigzag chains, there are angles where the silicon is asymmetric. This means it can exhibit chiral properties. Shining a circularly polarized laser at the point on the nanowire where metal and semiconductor meet produces a current, and the spin of the photons in that laser determines the direction of the current’s flow.

Dhara and Agarwal are currently working on ways to get planar silicon to exhibit these properties using the same mechanism.

After two Semiconductor Strategy Symposiums in Ho Chi Minh City in 2013 and 2014, SEMI announced today that a SEMI Member Delegation will visit the Vietnamese Central Government in Hanoi on September 21-24.  The objective of the SEMI Vietnam Business Delegation is to introduce SEMI Members to key government officials in several important ministries and economic development agencies in Hanoi and provide the opportunity to learn firsthand about new policies, investment and incentive plans in Vietnam. As Vietnam makes progress on its ambitious journey to establish semiconductor fabrication in the country, now is the right time for the government to interact more closely with foreign businesses, and for SEMI Members to understand the full breadth of opportunities available to them.

As an important stepping stone to Vietnam’s high-tech industries development plans towards 2020, Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung agreed in principle to support the country’s first semiconductor wafer fab, managed by Saigon Industry Corporation (CNS). The Prime Minister assigned the Ho Chi Minh City government to appraise and approve the project and oversee project execution. The SEMI delegation will engage with CNS, potential partners and the government around opportunities for foreign equipment and materials companies and on doing business in Vietnam.

The delegation visit will provide a structured but interactive way to meet representatives from the government as well as the Hoa Lac High Tech Park and the Samsung facility in Thay Nguyen, in order to get a full understanding of how to establish a business presence in Vietnam, find local partners and take advantage of the favorable policies available to the technology sector. With Samsung, Intel, LG Semiconductor, ON Semiconductor and other customers already well-positioned in Vietnam, our member companies have the opportunity to fully explore the promising and growing market in Vietnam.

In addition, workforce development and education are critical issues SEMI will discuss with Hanoi officials. SEMI will provide an overview of the SEMI Foundation and its “High Tech U” program and plans to introduce its first High Tech U event in Vietnam in spring of 2016.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and University of Western Australia researchers have developed a new process to develop few-layer graphene for use in energy storage and other material applications that is faster, potentially scalable and surmounts some of the current graphene production limitations.

Graphene is a thin atomic layer of graphite (used in pencils) with numerous properties that could be valuable in a variety of applications, including medicine, electronics and energy. Discovered only 11 years ago, graphene is one of the strongest materials in the world, highly conductive, flexible, and transparent. However, current methods for production currently require toxic chemicals and lengthy and cumbersome processes that result in low yield that is not scalable for commercial applications.

The new revolutionary one-step, high-yield generation process is detailed in the latest issue of Carbon, published by a collaborative team that includes BGU Prof. Jeffrey Gordon of the Alexandre Yersin Department of Solar Energy and Environmental Physics at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research and Prof. H.T. Chua’s group at the University of Western Australia (UWA, Perth).

Their ultra-bright lamp-ablation method surmounts the shortcomings and has succeeded in synthesizing few-layer (4-5) graphene in higher yields. It involves a novel optical system (originally invented by BGU Profs. Daniel Feuermann and Jeffrey Gordon) that reconstitutes the immense brightness within the plasma of high-power xenon discharge lamps at a remote reactor, where a transparent tube filled with simple, inexpensive graphite is irradiated.

The process is relatively faster, safer and green — devoid of any toxic substances (just graphite plus concentrated light).

Following this proof of concept, the BGU-UWA team is now planning an experimental program to scale up this initial success toward markedly improving the volume and rate at which few-layer (and eventually single-layer) graphene can be synthesized.

ROHM Co., Ltd., a developer of analog power IC solutions, announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Powervation Ltd., a privately held digital power IC company that develops digital power management system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for approximately $70M, in an all-cash transaction.

The strategic combination of Powervation’s Intelligent Digital Power platform with ROHM’s leading analog power technology and global market access will enable the company to address a broad range of fast growing market opportunities, as customers increasingly adopt digital power solutions to power next generation high density systems and ICs such as processors, memory, FPGAs and ASICs.

Since its founding in Ireland in 2006, as a University of Limerick spin-out, Powervation has established itself as a leading innovator in digital power controllers serving high performance Computing, Cloud and Communications infrastructure markets. The Company’s proprietary DSP control platform with patented xTune auto-tuning and ITM intelligent transient management technologies, has been adopted by industry leading customers who need advanced power management, precision telemetry / control and high efficiency solutions to power their complex multi-rail, multi-phase systems. Powervation delivers on these needs with further breakthroughs on design flexibility, fast time-to-market and lower total cost of ownership.

ROHM, a $3B global leader in analog and power semiconductors, supplies a diversified global customer base in the consumer, automotive and industrial markets. By acquiring Powervation, ROHM will gain leading-edge digital power technologies to strengthen its product offerings in the rapidly-growing cloud, data-center, and communications infrastructure markets. This acquisition will also enable ROHM to develop advanced digital power solutions for a broader range of markets and applications with Powervation’s flexible controller platform.

According to market research reports, digital power continues to progressively displace traditional analog technology in the $11B global power management IC market driven by its performance and energy efficiency advantages.

“ROHM and Powervation share a common vision for the role of digital power technology in transforming the market with next-generation high performance power solutions,” stated Mike Smith, SVP & GM of ROHM Semiconductor USA.

“The combination of our two companies will enable ROHM to develop industry-leading, integrated digital power solutions to serve a broad range of customers, markets, and applications spanning the entire spectrum from Computing and Communications to Consumer and Industrial,” stated Jun Iida, head of LSI development and member of the ROHM board of directors.

Powervation will become a fully owned subsidiary of ROHM, with principal design center in Cork, Ireland and system application centers in San Jose, CA and Asia which fuse expertise in power systems, digital control, silicon and embedded software. ROHM plans to accelerate product development through investment and synergies with ROHM analog / discrete power technologies and to increase market adoption further by leveraging ROHM’s global customer base and channels.

“The Powervation team is excited to join forces with ROHM, a top 25 global semiconductor company,” said Mike McAuliffe, CEO of Powervation. “It’s simply a great fit – we have built an innovative Digital Power IC company to date but the combination with ROHM now presents a compelling opportunity for broad market leadership in Digital Power Management solutions.”

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) today commended the launch of the Congressional Semiconductor Caucus. SIA recognized members of the caucus at a reception on Capitol Hill Tuesday evening and honored the caucus’s co-chairs, Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).

“Semiconductors form the foundation of America’s technological and economic strength, national security, and global competitiveness,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association. “The Congressional Semiconductor Caucus will provide a venue for Members of Congress and industry professionals to share ideas and work collaboratively to advance policies that preserve and strengthen the semiconductor industry and our country. We applaud Sen. Risch, Sen. King, Rep. Sessions, and Rep. Lofgren for leading the caucus and for their longstanding support of policies that promote growth and innovation.”

Semiconductors are the brains of modern electronics, making possible the myriad devices we use to work, communicate, travel, entertain, harness energy, treat illness, and make scientific discoveries. SIA is the voice of the U.S. semiconductor industry, uniting companies that account for 80 percent of America’s semiconductor production.

The semiconductor industry directly employs nearly a quarter of a million people in the U.S. and supports more than 1 million additional U.S. jobs. In 2014, sales from U.S. semiconductor companies accounted for more than half of the $336 billion in total global semiconductor sales. Semiconductors are America’s third-leading manufactured export, behind aircraft and automobiles. The industry is highly research-intensive, investing one-fifth of revenues in R&D annually – more than any other industry.

“In the semiconductor industry and across the tech sector, innovation is made possible through the hard work and ingenuity of the industry’s scientists and engineers and is aided by smart public policy from the federal government,” Neuffer said. “SIA looks forward to working with members of the Semiconductor Caucus to advance policies that facilitate free trade and open markets, modernize America’s tax system, strengthen America’s technology workforce, advance university research, and protect intellectual property, among other priorities.”

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.51 billion in orders worldwide in June 2015 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 0.98, according to the June EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.  A book-to-bill of 0.98 means that $98 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 June 2015 was $1.51 billion. The bookings figure is 2.6 percent lower than the final May 2015 level of $1.55 billion, and is 3.5 percent higher than the June 2014 order level of $1.46 billion.

The three-month average of worldwide billings in June 2015 was $1.54 billion. The billings figure is 1.0 percent lower than the final May 2015 level of $1.56 billion, and is 16.2 percent higher than the June 2014 billings level of $1.33 billion.

“The June book-to-bill saw slight declines in the three-month averages for both booking and billings compared to May,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI.  “Both figures, however, are above the trends reported one year ago and the first half of the year has been one of positive growth.”

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
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 

$1,515.3

$1,573.7

1.04
May 2015 (final)

$1,557.3

$1,546.2

0.99
June 2015 (prelim)

$1,542.1

$1,506.1

0.98

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