Category Archives: MEMS

December 4, 2012 – TechSearch International Inc. and the IEEE Women in Engineering Committee (WIE) are establishing a $2500 scholarship for women going into the field of engineering.

The scholarship, named the IEEE Frances B. Hugle Engineering Scholarship, honors the memory of the distinguished engineer who co-founded Hugle Industries, Siliconix, Stewart Warner Microcircuits Inc., and Opto-Electronics Devices Inc. TechSearch International, in celebration of its 25th anniversary, and its founder, E. Jan Vardaman, seeded the scholarship with a $5000 donation this year. The objective is to raise $100,000 during the next few years.

To encourage young women to follow in Hugle’s footsteps, IEEE WIE will select one scholar annually to receive a $2500 scholarship, beginning as early as 2013. The scholarship will be presented to one female in her third year of undergraduate study in an engineering curriculum at an accredited university or college in the US. Student membership in the IEEE is required.

Hugle graduated from the University of Chicago in 1946 with degrees in chemistry, physics, and philosophy and received her M.Sc. degree from the University of Cincinnati. In each of the companies she co-founded, she served as a director of R&D and as chief engineer. She held 16 known patents in the field of electronics and was one of the pioneers in the invention of tape automated bonding (TAB).

The IEEE Foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization in the US, is accepting and managing the donations. Donations can be made:

  1. Online at www.ieee.org/donate by selecting the Frances B. Hugle Memorial Fund

  2. By check payable to the IEEE Foundation — Frances B. Hugle Memorial Fund and mailed to IEEE Foundation, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, US.

TechSearch International Inc., founded in 1987, is a market research firm specializing in technology trends, microelectronics packaging, and assembly.

EV Group has completed its expanded cleanroom IV facility at its corporate headquarters in Austria, which doubled its cleanroom space for process development and pilot production services.

As part of the company’s long-term growth strategy to address high-volume tool orders and speed time to market, EV Group, a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment, also increased the size of its application labs, added new R&D facilities for internal tool development and testing, and opened a new customer and employee training center.

The customer and employee training center provides several new rooms for instructional training courses, as well as a large number of manual and automated EVG tools for training.

While manufacturing and product development are centralized at EV Group’s corporate headquarters, technology and process development teams in Austria work closely with the company’s subsidiaries in Tempe, AZ; Albany, NY; Yokohama and Fukuoka, Japan; Seoul, South Korea; and Chung-Li, Taiwan, where additional, state-of-the-art application labs and cleanroom facilities are available.

Earlier this year, the addition of an ultra-modern manufacturing facility that doubled the production floor space marked the completion of the first phase of EVG’s long term expansion plans. Already positively contributing to EVG’s growth from the beginning of 2012, the company increased its order intake in FY12 (ended September 30) by 5 percent over fiscal 2011, and increased its revenue by 20 percent within the same period.

November 21, 2012 – A reference book from the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) and IC Insights puts foundry information at the fingertips of those who need it the most.

GSA and IC Insights have joined forces again to produce the fifth edition of the IC Foundry Almanac, a concise annual reference book for foundry segment analysis, five-year forecasts, wafer and mask set pricing information, and foundry company profile data.

The partnership combines IC Insights’ analysis of market growth and capacity trends with GSA’s analysis of wafer and mask set pricing data and extensive database of IC foundry service provider profiles.

Report highlights include:

  • Foundry segment analysis, including IC foundry industry analysis, sales analysis, and capacity;

  • Wafer fabrication and mask set pricing & capacity trends, including median wafer fabrication and mask set pricing, additional purchase details, foundry details, and capacity trends; and

  • IC foundry service provider company profiles, with company contact information and stock exchange/ticker.

 

November 19, 2012 – Researchers from Rice U. say they have developed a micron-scale spatial light modulator (SLM) built on SOI that runs orders-of-magnitude faster than its siblings used in sensing and imaging devices. The "antenna-on-a-chip for light modulation," developed with backing from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is described in Nature‘s Scientific Reports.

While light processing has found use in consumer electronics (CDs and DVDs), communications (fiber optics), of course lighting applications (LEDs) and even industrial materials processing (lasers for cutting, welding, etc.), photonics for computing applications are still being explored, and reliant upon waveguides in 2D space. So-called "free space" spatial light modulators (SLM), however, could tap into "the massive multiplexing capability of optics," in that "multiple light beams can propagate in the same space without affecting each other," explains researcher Qianfan Xu.

To demonstrate, the Rice team built SLM chips with nanoscale ribs of crystalline silicon surrounded by SiO2 claddings, forming a cavity between positively and negatively dopes Si connected to metallic electrodes. The positions of the ribs are subject to nanoscale "perturbations" and tune the resonating cavity to couple with incident light outside. This coupling pulls incident light into the cavity; infrared light passes through silicon but is captured by the SML and can be manipulated to the chip on the other side, with electrodes’ field switched on/off at very high speeds.

In the paper they go into more detail on the structure of the device:

SLMs are fabricated in a CMOS photonics foundry at the Institute of Microelectronics of Singapore. The fabrication starts on an SOI wafer with a 220nm-thick silicon layer and a 3μm-thick buried oxide layer. To construct the 1D PhC cavities, silicon ribs with the height of 170nm are patterned on a silicon slab with the thickness of 50nm using 248nm deep-UV lithography and inductively-coupled plasma etching. Following the etching, the p-i-n junctions are formed by patterned ion implantations with a dosage of 5 × 1014 cm-2 for both the p+ and n+ doping regions. A 2.1μm-thick SiO2 layer is then deposited onto the wafer using plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD). Finally, vias are opened on the ion-implanted areas and a 1.5μm-thick aluminum layer is sputtered and etched to form the electric connections. The serial resistance of the diode is measured to be 105 Ω. After the fabrication process, the contact pads connecting to the p-i-n junction are wire-bonded to a SMA connector with a 50-ohms terminal resistor for impedance match.

The 3D FDTD simulations are done with commercial software Lumermical FDTD. A non-uniform grid is used which has a spatial resolution ~30nm around the resonator. Even though perturbation we introduced is much smaller than the grid size, the software is capable of incorporate that in the simulation. When a dielectric interface (Si/SiO2) lies between two grid points, the program modifies the dielectric constant at the neighboring grid points according to the position of interface. This way, the small shift of the dielectric interface due to the width perturbation is taken into account in the simulation.

Conventional integrated photonics incorporate an array of pixels whose transmission can be manipulated at very high speed, explains Xu; adding an optical beam can change the intensity or phase of the exiting light. In LED screens and micromirror arrays in projectors (both of which are SLMs) where each pixel changes the intensity of light which generates an image, some switching speeds can get down to microseconds, but that’s far too slow for moving data around in a computing application. The new Rice device can "potentially modulate a signal at more than 10 gigabits per second."

Another key to their device is that it is silicon-based and can be fabricated at volume in a CMOS fab, which can scale up the capabilities to build very large arrays with high yield, he adds. For example, Rice researchers are separately creating a single-pixel camera, which initially took eight hours to process an image; this new SLM chip could enable it to handle real-time video. Alternatively, a million-pixel array could mean "a million channels of data throughput in your system, with all this signal processing in parallel" and at gigahertz levels, he said.

Xu is careful to note that the new SLM antenna-on-a-chip is not for general computing, but more for optical processing comparable in power to supercomputers. Optical information processing is " not fast-developing right now like plasmonics, nanophotonics, those areas," he admits, "but I hope our device can put some excitement back into that field."

Left: An illustration showing the design of Rice University researchers’ antenna-on-a-chip for spatial light modulation. The chip couples with incident light and makes possible the manipulation of infrared light at very high speeds for signal processing and other optical applications. Right: Crystalline silicon sits between two electrodes in the antenna-on-a-chip.  (Credit: Xu Group/Rice University)

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Rolla, MO-based Brewer Science introduced a line of conductive CNT ink materials that are surfactant free, require no additional rinse steps, and are compatible with a broad range of printed electronic substrates. Cure temperatures for desired conductivity results are between 115°C and 130°C. Inks with high concentrations of CNTs in low-viscosity solutions are available in aqueous and solvent-based systems, giving them broad compatibility and enabling the design of inks for a broad set of application technologies such as sensors, displays, and packaging integration. Formulations are available for Optomec’s Aerosol Jet® technology systems, Fujifilm Dimatix’s materials printer DMP-2800, spray coating, and drawdown bar coating. 

These CNT inks have achieved sheet resistance of 300 ohm/sq for 85%T (optical transmission) at 550 nm for transparent conductive applications.  For conductive trace applications, sheet resistance of 1 ohm/sq and conductivity of 75,000 siemens/meter have been achieved.  Films produced with these inks on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) have demonstrated both high adhesion and mechanical flexibility. Both adhesion and conductivity remain stable after repeated folding of the CNT-coated PET.

“This robust performance will enable flexible printed electronic device applications,” “These solutions contain no surfactants and require no additional post-process rinsing, which will speed commercial adoption by eliminating the cost of the extra rinse process steps and preventing generation of a CNT-contaminated waste stream,” said Jim Lamb, Director of Brewer Science’s Printed Electronics Technology Center. “Although we designed these materials for plastic printed electronics applications, they are also compatible with a wide range of substrates such as paper, glass, silicon, and metal.”

Materials are developed by Brewer Science’s Printed Electronics Technology Center as part of its CNT materials, applications, and device prototyping services at the Jordan Valley Innovation Center in Springfield, Missouri. “Brewer Science is focused on bringing the unique properties of CNTs for commercial electronics applications to customers in the next three to five years,” added Lamb.

 

MIPI Alliance has formed an open "Birds of a Feather" (BoF) group that will investigate the requirements related to integrating sensors into mobile systems. The group will address challenges facing the sensor and wireless markets, including a fragmented digital interface landscape, a rapidly expanding number of sensors per device, the varied signals per device, and non-scalable architectures.

The Sensor BoF is open to non-MIPI member companies, insuring the group receives input from the broad sensor and wireless device ecosystem.

As one of the group’s first efforts, MIPI Alliance and the MEMS Industry Group (MIG) conducted a member-based market research study of 37 companies, to discover the present and future needs necessary to meet growing mobile sensor demands. While the need for a sensor interface standard was not immediately apparent, there was a clear gap between the technology of today and the needs of the future. Closing that gap will be a primary focus of the Sensor BoF group.

In the study, the reasons that would lead companies to consider having a new sensor standard include: lower cost, better performance, common sensor protocol, and time to market. Reasons for not considering a new sensor standard include: the cost, time, and complexity needed to develop the standard interface. Click here to see all the results.

Revenues for MEMS sensors

According to IHS iSuppli, revenues for MEMS sensors in mobile handsets and consumer products is expected to top $2.5 billion in 2013, up from $1.1 billion in 2008 and reflecting an 18% CAGR in the 2008-2013 timeframe. MIG Managing Director Karen Lightman also sees strong interest among many of her members in advancing sensor technology in wireless applications.

 "The massive proliferation of sensors in diverse applications is driving the trend toward standardization of sensor interfaces," said Lightman. "With MEMS playing a major role in the adoption of sensors worldwide, we recognize the importance of investigating the requirements needed to address this rapidly growing space."

November 8, 2012 – Growing use of disposable devices and respiratory monitoring are underpinning growing use of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) used as pressure sensors in medical electronics, according to IHS iSuppli.

Medical electronics is a relatively small slice of the overall market for MEMS pressure sensors. Sales of such devices are seen rising 6%-7% this year to $137.6M, with steady growth continuing through 2016. But they’re in the "high-value" category where suppliers can command much higher average selling prices, so it’s a more profitable and attractive market, points out Richard Dixon, principal analyst for MEMS & sensors at IHS. (Another high-value MEMS category, industrial and military/aerospace, will rake in about $283M this year.)

Worldwide high-value MEMS pressure sensor revenue forecast, in US $M. (Source: IHS iSuppli)

Pressure sensors are poised to become the leading type of MEMS device, generating $1.5B in revenue. In medical applications the technology is found in accurate low-pressure measurement devices. They are particularly seen as a low-cost consumable for invasive applications such as the monitoring of blood pressure. The most common medical pressure sensor is the disposable catheter to monitor blood pressure and micro vascular resistance in the vicinity of the heart. Another type of disposable (and low-cost) MEMS pressure sensor is the infusion pump, used to introduce fluids, medication, or nutrients into a patient’s circulatory system — 60M units of these devices were shipped in 2011.

MEMS pressure sensors also have use in non-invasive applications where they are reusable and cost considerably more. The biggest category in this segment is respiratory monitoring, such as the Continuous Positive Air Pressure (CPAP), used mainly to treat sleep apnea at home. (The US is the main market for such devices, since the treatment is included in healthcare programs, iSuppli notes.) Another application is in oxygen therapy machines, incorporating both a low-pressure and high-pressure sensor, to administer or increase the amount of oxygen in a patient’s blood. This application is growing given the aging population and increase in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Another respiratory-use market, though currently small, is in ventilators to treat lung injuries, asthma, and adult or acute respiratory distress syndrome.

Yet another medical market for MEMS pressure sensors is in measuring vital signs: benchtop or mounted-central-station patient monitors, and multiparameter monitoring devices. Low-end instruments include at least one non-invasive pressure sensor; midrange counterparts comprise one or two such devices, and high-end devices have both non-invasive and invasive pressure sensing, as well as additional respiratory pressure sensing.

One market "in its infancy today" but with high promise is implantable devices such as cardiac monitors, glaucoma monitors, and cranial pressure monitors, iSuppli notes. With a cardiac sensor a patient can be monitored from his/her home, eliminating repeat hospital visits for tests — which would realize huge savings in healthcare costs.

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November 6, 2012 – Concern over a worrisome trend of underinvestment in semiconductor startups has prompted the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) to form a new working group. Its inaugural mission: identify various alternatives to encourage startups to innovate, woo investors, generate returns, and keep generating sustainable industry M&A.

Investors are getting spooked from injecting capital into emerging semiconductor companies where the rate of return is becoming a longer-shot target. Complex digital IC products can require $100 million or more to develop and a decade or more to ramp-up with revenues; the GSA quotes analyst Andy Rappaport suggesting a semiconductor startup needs to hit $1B in a 5-10 year window off a $100M investment. Meanwhile, the semiconductor sector leads all industries in terms of R&D as a percentage of sales (24% for the 12 months 1Q11-1Q12), says the GSA. Besides the design and mask costs, there’s another $20M-$30M needed just for embedded software to make the design work, "an investment that is not easily recovered in the semiconductor business model where the price is often expected by the market to reflect silicon size," the GSA notes.

As a result, seed/Series A fundings have plummeted over the past decade, from several dozen annually averaging $9M-$10M in the 2000s to now just a handful averaging around $6M-$7M (and just $4.7M in 2011). That’s creating a major "innovation gap" in which there are fewer high-growth startup opportunities available, to be harvested by larger semiconductor firms seeking to bolster their position, leading to a longer-term move away from M&A as a viable strategy to achieve innovation and growth.

Total semiconductor Series A/seed funding, 2000-2011. (Source: GSA)

To address this widening gulf, the GSA has initiated a new "Capital Lite" working group populated with leaders from VCs, fabless firms and IDMs, semiconductor suppliers, and execs from finance, banking, and M&A interests. The group’s first official act is a white paper, "A Startup’s Guide to Surviving an Investment Drought," aimed to help inform and "invigorate" investment activity around semiconductor startups. Assisting this effort is a new resource portal in conjunction with IPextreme as a centralized location for tools and services from the entire semiconductor supply chain.

In the white paper, the group advocates for a "capital-lite" approach: a semiconductor startup sources services (e.g. IP, sales/marketing, SG&A, engineering, shuttle runs, etc.) from a larger semiconductor partner, which in turn reaps the benefits of another revenue source. The group puts out three types of hybrid financing models emphasizing different areas: low ASPs and high-volume markets i.e. consumer; higher ASPs/mid-volume markets i.e. enterprise; and IP-sharing/joint R&D. The group also advocates for a recently formed VC fund, "Silicon Ventures," which proposes to balance the risks between the startup, strategic partner/acquirer, and investors. It also points to the "Lean Startup" approach championed by entrepreneur Eric Ries, visualized as a "distributed startup" ecosystem here third-party technical activities are parceled out. (Adapteva is listed as a success story for this model.)

"We are looking to reverse the current decline in venture capital investment in the industry by re-balancing the risks associated with semiconductor start-ups," stated Silicon Ventures co-founder Ken Lawler. "Our model does this through active collaboration from inception between a start-up, a strategic partner/acquirer, and the investors, which will reduce product development costs, speed time to market, and provide compelling acquisition opportunities for the strategic partners."

November 2, 2012 – After a strong surge in 2010 from the 2009 downturn and solid growth in 2011, the market for optoelectronics, sensors/actuators, and discrete semiconductors (O-S-D) lost most of its momentum in 2012 as the world’s weak economy wobbles forward and uncertainty clouds the near-term outlook — particularly in Europe and the US, according to IC Insights.

With revenue growth in electronics systems manufacturing slowing to 3% in 2012 from a more-normal 6% increase in 2011, most O-S-D product categories have weakened. Sequential quarterly sales growth in the O-S-D market continues to drift lower, while the global economy struggles to regain its footing and fully recover from the 2008-2009 recession.

The steady falloff has caused IC Insights to lower its 2012 O-S-D market forecast to 2% growth from a 7% increase projected early this year. The new forecast means total O-S-D sales are now expected to reach a record-high level of $58.2 billion in 2012 compared to the current annual peak of $57.4 billion set in 2011.

O-S-D market flattens and drifts lower after recovery rebound. (Source: IC Insights)

Optoelectronics is propping up overall O-S-D sales growth in 2012. Revenues for optoelectronics are now forecast to rise by 8% to reach a new record high of $27.5 billion in 2012, thanks to strong sales growth in lamp devices (+18%) driven by new solid-state lighting applications and CMOS image sensors (+21%) used in more digital cameras for smartphones, tablet computers, surveillance networks, and other equipment. Sales of sensors and actuator devices are now projected to rise by just 2% in 2012, but that will set a new record high of $8.7 billion. The commodity-filled discretes segment is expected to fall 6% to $22.0 billion. When the three O-S-D segments are combined with IC sales (now projected at $259.4 billion), the total semiconductor market is forecast to be $317.6 billion in 2012, a 1% decline from 2011.

With electronics systems manufacturing beginning to strengthen and the global economy forecast to show some improvement in 2013, IC Insights is forecasting modest revenue growth in all three O-S-D market segments. Optoelectronics revenues are projected to grow 7% in 2013 to $29.3 billion, while dollar volumes in the sensors/actuators segment are forecast to rise 10% to about $9.6 billion, and sales of discretes are expected to rebound by 5% to reach $23.1 billion.

November 1, 2012 – X-Fab Silicon Foundries says it has become the majority shareholder in German MEMS Foundry Itzehoe GmbH (MFI), the latest in a series of recent moves to raise its profile as a top MEMS foundry.

The MFI business, renamed X-Fab MEMS Foundry Itzehoe, complements X-Fab’s capabilities in its MEMS foundry in Erfurt, adding technologies for microsensors, actuators, micro-optical structures and hermetic wafer-level packaging processes. X-Fab originally signed MFI as a contract MEMS manufacturing partner in Feb. 2011, a deal that expanded its capabilities across a range of 200mm MEMS technologies. Its ownership stake in MFI is now 51%, up from 25.5%.

X-Fab MEMS Foundry Itzehoe will continue its long-term cooperation with the Frauhofer Institute for Silicon Technology‘s (ISIT) MEMS Group. MFI was spun out of ISIT in 2009 and is located within the same wafer fabrication facility in Itzehoe/Germany.

"Our customers will benefit from both an even wider spectrum of available MEMS technologies and from direct access to X-Fab’s manufacturing facilities for CMOS-compatible MEMS processes," stated Thomas Hartung, VP of marketing at X-Fab Group. "X-Fab MEMS Foundry Itzehoe will play an important role in the implementation of our MEMS strategy, and brings us closer to our goal of becoming one of the top three pure-play MEMS foundry providers."

"The rich combination of the versatile MEMS-specific technology portfolio at the Itzehoe-based MEMS foundry and the development expertise of Fraunhofer ISIT greatly expands the capabilities of X-Fab’s technology offering," added Peter Merz, managing director of X-Fab MEMS Foundry Itzehoe. "We are delighted to provide the full bandwidth of MEMS technologies including vacuum and optical wafer-level packaging or TSV backed by X-Fab’s existing and well-proven foundry services. This integration brings X-Fab customers bundled and accelerated product development and manufacturing cycles for micro-machined devices such as inertial sensors, micro-mirrors, and piezoelectric transducers."

Barely a month ago X-Fab pledged to invest $50M over the next three years to support projected growth and a goal of "becoming one of the top three worldwide suppliers of MEMS foundry services." (X-Fab placed 10th in Yole Développement’s 2011 MEMS foundry rankings, surging 33% to roughly $16M in revenues, about $31M shy of No.3 Silex Microsystems.) Among X-Fab‘s other recent MEMS accomplishments: