Category Archives: Advanced Packaging

In a season when their sales should be rising sharply, suppliers of large-sized liquid-crystal (LCD) panels instead are encountering weak demand growth in the third quarter, exacerbating the glut already plaguing the market.

Measured in terms of square meters, supply of large-sized LCDs is expected to exceed demand by 15.9 percent during the period from July through September, according to the latest report entitled “Oversupply to Continue Due to Weak Economy” from information and analytics provider IHS. This is up nearly 3 percentage points from the previous forecast of a 13.2 percent oversupply, as presented in the figure below.

While the glut will decline compared to the second quarter—as is normal during the pre-holiday season—the surplus remains at elevated levels.

“This is the time of the year when LCD panel makers usually are ramping up production to meet holiday demand for televisions, notebook PCs, tablets and other consumer-oriented electronics,” said Ricky Park, senior manager for large-area displays at IHS. “However, the display industry is confronting the prospect of weak sales growth and a lack of visibility into future demand trends. With a combination of flagging economic conditions and the end of a popular television incentive plan in China, large-sized LCD panel supply is expected to overshoot demand by a higher margin than previously predicted.”

IHS defines large-sized LCDs as panels that have a diagonal dimension of 7 inches or greater used in devices such as televisions, notebook PCs and monitors.

Demand dearth

Global large-sized LCD panel demand in terms of square meters is expected to rise by a tepid 6 percent in the third quarter compared to the second. In most years, growth is typically larger because of seasonal factors. Expansion in 2012, for instance, was in double-digit territory at more than 10 percent.

Meanwhile, production capacity utilization among large-sized LCD makers is on the rise, increasing to 84 percent in the third quarter, up from 79 percent in the second.

The combination of the weaker-than-normal increase in demand and the significant expansion in utilization will combine to inflate the excess supply to higher levels.

China’s challenge

For their part, Chinese television makers are experiencing swelling inventories because of weaker-than-expected sales. The companies are likely to reduce their sales targets for 2013 and are trimming panel orders for the second half of the year.

Although China continues to enjoy the strongest economic growth among the major world economies, signs of weakness abound as export growth has declined sharply, due to a stagnant global economic recovery, a stronger yuan, and the Chinese government’s efforts to stem currency speculation. Given the deterioration of its export industry and the sluggish global economy, China can no longer depend on exports to fuel its overall economic growth.

Furthermore, the Chinese government has terminated its subsidy program for energy-saving TVs that had been driving sales earlier this year. This will further reduce panel demand.

Researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of North Carolina have demonstrated a new design for an instrument, a "instrumented nanoscale indenter," that makes sensitive measurements of the mechanical properties of thin films — ranging from auto body coatings to microelectronic devices — and biomaterials. The NIST instrument uses a unique technique for precisely measuring the depth of the indentation in a test surface with no contact of the surface other than the probe tip itself.

Nanoindenter head

Indenters have a long history in materials research. Johan August Brinell devised one of the first versions in 1900. The concept is to drop or ram something hard onto the test material and gauge the material’s hardness by the depth of the dent. This is fine for railway steel, but modern technology has brought more challenging measurements: the stiffness of micromechanical sensors used in auto airbags, the hardness of thin coatings on tool bits, the elasticity of thin biological membranes. These require precision measurements of depth in terms of nanometers and force in terms of micronewtons.

Instead of dents in metal, says NIST’s Douglas Smith, "We are trying to get the most accurate measurement possible of how far the indenter tip penetrates into the surface of the specimen, and how much force it took to push it in that far. We record this continuously. It’s called ‘instrumented indentation testing’."

A major challenge, Smith says, is that at the nanoscale you need to know exactly where the surface of the test specimen is relative to the indenter’s tip. Some commercial instruments do this by touching the surface with a reference part of the instrument that is a known distance from the tip, but this introduces additional problems. "For example, if you want to look at creep in polymer — which is one thing that our instrument is particularly good at—that reference point itself is going to be creeping into the polymer just under its own contact force. That’s an error you don’t know and can’t correct for," says Smith.

The NIST solution is a touchless surface detector that uses a pair of tiny quartz tuning forks — the sort used to keep time in most wrist watches. When the tuning forks get close to the test surface, the influence of the nearby mass changes their frequency — not much, but enough. The nanoindenter uses that frequency shift to "lock" the position of the indenter mechanism at a fixed distance from the test surface, but without exerting any detectable force on the surface itself.

"The only significant interaction we want is between the indenter and the specimen," says Smith, "or at least, to be constant and not deforming the surface. This is a significant improvement over the commercial instruments."

The NIST nanoindenter can apply forces up to 150 millinewtons, taking readings a thousand times a second, with an uncertainty lower than 2 micronewtons, and while measuring tip penetration up to 10 micrometers to within about 0.4nm. All of this in done in a way that can be traceably calibrated against basic SI units for force and displacement in a routine manner.

The instrument is well suited for high-precision measurements of hardness, elasticity and creep and similar properties for a wide range of materials, including often difficult to measure soft materials such as polymer films, says Smith, but one of its primary uses will be in the development of reference materials that can be used to calibrate other instrumented indenters. "There still are no NIST standard reference materials for this class of instruments because we wanted to have an instrument that was better than the commercial instruments for doing that," Smith explains.

Together with its partners STFC and Fraunhofer IIS, imec announced today that the European Commission has pledged to continue funding the Europractice IC services for another three years under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

"The EU’s continued support of the Europractice IC services speaks to the value of our efforts to help get European ASIC (application specific integrated circuits)-based products to market quickly and cost effectively,” stated Carl Das, director of the Europractice IC service at imec. “This funding will enable us to continue to provide the best and most advanced solutions to European academia and research institutes, start-up companies and companies within small niche markets.”

Europractice IC service is internationally recognized as a leading service to universities and industry for design, development, prototyping and manufacturing of application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) on a cost-sharing basis. Today, about 500 universities, 150 research centers and more than 200 European companies have access to this service.

Europractice IC services offers dedicated training courses on design flows and methods in advanced technologies, and has negotiated low cost opportunities with the most popular industry-standard CAD vendors and foundries.  As such, academics and research centers have access to state-of-the-art CAD tools for training and non-commercial research, and to multi-project wafer (MPW) runs for prototyping and manufacturing.  Europractice IC services also supports companies in the assembly and testing phase. Over the next three years, the service will expand its offering from ASIC services to prototyping possibilities in MEMS and photonics-related technologies.

Compound Photonics announced an agreement with RFMD whereby Compound Photonics will purchase Europe’s largest gallium arsenide (GaAs) manufacturing facility in Newton Aycliffe, County Durham, England.

"Compound Photonics will soon release projector products for mobile devices that are three times brighter and smaller than current state of the art.  To achieve these next generation levels of performance we need to vertically integrate the design and manufacture of the entire light engine.  This acquisition will bring in-house the manufacturing capabilities for the lasers required to power these engines," said Jonathan A. Sachs, Ph.D., president and CEO of Compound Photonics. "The skilled and experienced people, the fab with its toolset, supply chain, mature processes, and a track record of high volume production are ready made for our laser production."

Compound Photonics will use the 53 acre site with its 50,000-square-foot GaAs wafer fab to produce green, red and infrared lasers. The addition of the systems, fabrication equipment, and research and development capabilities as well as the manufacturing team with experience supplying high volume components to leading mobile phone manufacturers  expands Compound Photonics capacity and flexibility to meet its aggressive growth plans.

The powerful, high efficiency, wavelength stabilized laser diodes will be used as illumination sources in miniature high definition 1080p projectors for smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices, as well as ultra high definition 4K projectors and automotive head up displays. Wavelength stabilized infrared lasers for emerging gesture recognition applications will also be manufactured using wafer scale production methods in Newton Aycliffe.

The Newton Aycliffe facility complements Compound Photonics’ 40,000 square-foot semiconductor processing facility in Phoenix, Arizona where it manufactures liquid crystal on silicon displays and optics systems for its laser projection light engines.

Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Micralyne, Inc., an independent MEMS developer-manufacturer specializing in high-value applications, today announced a collaboration with Adamant-Kogyo Co., Ltd., a leading supplier of fine precision products for the optical communications industry, for the development and manufacture of micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS)-based fiber-optic subsystems. The companies’ joint solutions will serve markets for which a high-performance, ultra-reliable sensor-enabled communications backbone is essential.

Building upon a decade-long partnership in the global MEMS industry, Micralyne and Adamant will leverage their respective core competencies to develop new MEMS-based optical subsystems.

“Micralyne’s strength in optical MEMS component integration in performance-intensive industrial applications complements the subsystem design and packaging expertise of our longstanding partner, Adamant,” said Mike Ciprick, acting president and CEO, Micralyne. “Through our new alliance with Adamant, we aim to lead the industry in quality and reliability for the wide range of applications that benefit from MEMS-based fiber-optic sensors.”

“The global market for fiber-optic point sensors and related subsystems is growing exponentially,” said Yoichi Shimoda, president, Adamant. “In fact, the market research firm, ElectroniCast, has forecast a compound annual growth rate of more than 20 percent between 2012-2017, reaching US$3.98 billion by 2017. With demand for high-performance MEMS sensors especially strong—and with Micralyne so proficient there—we will work in partnership to map out the best possible solutions for this market.”

CEA-Leti today announced that a group of European and Japanese companies, research institutes, universities and cities will work together in the ClouT project to deliver ways for cities to leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing – to become smart cities.

ClouT, which stands for “cloud of things,” will develop infrastructure, services, tools and applications for municipalities and their various stakeholders – including citizens, service developers and application integrators – to create, deploy and manage user-centric applications that capitalize on the latest advances in IoT and cloud computing.

The IoT allows users to connect “everything” (sensors, objects, actuators, mobile phones, servers, etc.) and gather and share information in real-time from the physical environment. Cloud computing lets users process, store and access information with virtually unlimited processing and storage capacity. ClouT will integrate the latest advances in these domains and, with its user-centric approach, allow end users in cities to create their own cloud services and share them with other citizens.

Target applications include enhanced public transportation, increased citizen participation through the use of mobile devices to photograph and record situations of interest to city administrators, safety management, city-event monitoring and emergency management. The project, which is coordinated in Europe by Leti, includes nine industrial and research partners and four cities: Santander, Spain; Genoa, Italy; Fujisawa, Japan and Mitaka, Japan. The applications will be validated in those cities via field trials with citizens.

By combining EU and Japanese resources, the three-year, nearly 4 million-euro project is designed to create an on-going synergy for smart-city initiatives between Europe and Japan.

ClouT is jointly funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission and by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan.

 

Making a stellar debut, high-resolution liquid-crystal display (LCD) panels featuring resolutions of 300 pixels per inch (ppi) or more are appearing in media tablets for the first time this year, with shipments set to approach 13 million units.

Up from virtually zero in 2012, at least 12.6 million LCD tablet panels with 300-ppi-or-higher resolutions will ship in 2013, according to insights from the Display Materials & Systems Service at information and analytics provider IHS. Shipments will then more than double next year and continue to climb to 55.0 million units by 2017.

“Tablet makers want to differentiate their products, increase their market presence, boost demand and improve their profitability by offering high-performance displays,” said Sweta Dash, senior director for display research at IHS. “Display suppliers are supporting this trend with increased production of higher-pixel-density LCD panels that employ the latest technologies to pack more pixels into every inch of screen space. This will create a whole new class of displays with 300 ppi and higher resolution that will represent the new high end for the tablet business.”

Pixel proliferation

The new 300-ppi class will join existing 200-ppi categories to form a freshly expanded line of high-resolution displays. And while shipments of such panels will keep growing and increasingly rule the tablet space, lower-resolution panels of 100-150 and 151-200 ppi will see their markets decline or remain flat over the years.

Prior to 300 ppi, the highest resolution for tablets was in the 251- to 300-ppi range, where Apple’s 9.7-inch iPad 4 and the 9.0-inch Barnes & Noble nook HD+ belong. Panel shipments for this resolution segment are forecast this year to reach 67.2 million units, up 47 percent from 45.7 million in 2012.

Below that segment are tablet panels in the 200- to 251-ppi range, home to the 7.0-inch Amazon Kindle Fire HD and the 10.0-inch Google Nexus 10. Panel shipments here are projected this year at 22.8 million units, up 88 percent from 12.1 million.

SID and fancy displays

Examples of the new 300-ppi panel for tablets could be seen at the recent Society for Information Display (SID) conference in Vancouver, a prominent industry event where panel manufacturers discuss new technologies and advances in the field.

At the event in May, LG Display showed a 7-inch high-definition tablet panel of more than 300 ppi, while rival Samsung Electronics countered with a 10.1-inch 300-ppi tablet panel.

Taiwan’s Innolux also had its own offering—a 6-inch high-definition, low-temperature polysilicon panel at 368 ppi.

Some of the new high-resolution displays slated for release this year will make use of oxide thin film-transistor (TFT) technology, similar to what was glimpsed at SID. The technology is considered a next-generation solution for panels, due to the mechanism’s high transparency and low power consumption.

Notebook panels also to benefit

High-resolution displays will also be coming to LCD panels for notebook PCs, judging from the SID exhibits. Samsung unveiled a 13.3-inch notebook PC panel with 275 ppi—higher than the 227 ppi of the much lauded 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Meanwhile, LG Display presented a 14- inch notebook LCD panel featuring 221 ppi.

For the notebook business in particular, where sales have suffered as consumers defected to smartphones and tablets, high-resolution displays could be what mobile PC manufacturers need to entice consumers to replace their older laptops. The new displays can be deployed to make products stand out from the rest of the field, create new demand among consumers, and boost revenue and profitability, IHS believes.

In line with the theme of higher performance, glass companies were likewise at SID to demonstrate glass substrates, an important component of LCD panels, for enabling next-generation displays.

Both New York-based Corning and Japan’s Asahi Glass announced glass substrate products at the show, formulated for high-performance displays intended to improve quality and productivity.

Global inventory of liquid-crystal display television (LCD TV) panels is set to rise to its highest level in 19 months in August, with the elevated stockpiles expected to contribute to a decline in prices in the second half of the year.

Weeks of LCD TV panel inventory held by suppliers are set to increase to 5.0 in August, up from 4.9 in July and 4.8 in June, according to the IHS report entitled "LCD Industry Tracker – TV" from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). The last time the inventory reached this level was January 2012.

“LCD TV panel inventory is entering into above-normal territory in July and August,” said Ricky Park, senior manager for large-area displays at IHS. “Stockpiles are on the rise because of a delay in economic recovery for many areas of the world, along with growing uncertainty regarding domestic demand in China. The combination of a glut in panels and weak demand will cause price reductions to accelerate in the third quarter compared to the second.”

Average LCD TV panel prices are forecast to decline in a range from 3 to 6 percent in the third quarter, compared to a 1 to 2 percent decrease in the second quarter.

TV demand remains weaker than expected—not only in the developed markets such as North America and Europe but also in emerging markets.

Sino subsidy suspension

Panel inventories in China are on the rise due to a mix of industry and government factors.

For one, Chinese TV brands overstocked panels in the first half. Moreover, the government in Beijing has terminated its subsidy program for energy-saving TVs, a development expected to dampen demand in the second half.

In light of the weak demand and rising inventory, Chinese TV manufacturers are cutting panel orders. These domestic TV brands account for more than 80 percent of shipments in China, the world’s largest TV market.

With the exception of February during the Lunar New Year holiday when they disposed of more panels than they actually purchased, China’s Top 6 television makers increased their LCD panel purchases significantly every month in 2013 compared to the same periods in 2012. However, they plan to purchase 24 percent fewer panels in July and 25 percent less in August than they did during the same months in 2012.

DAS Environmental Expert GmbH of Dresden, Germany, has developed SALIX, a point-of-use system for removing waste gas pollutants in semiconductor wafer manufacturing wet bench applications. This solves a common problem where gases from the solvents, acids and alkaline materials used in wet processing combine to form a powder in the exhaust line. This powder can be a “toxic bomb” according to Dr. Horst Reichardt, CEO and president of DAS, or at least cause throughput and cost issues since the exhaust may have to be cleaned every one to two days.

The single-wafer cleaning process widely used for cleaning 300-millimeter wafers in wet benches distributes cleaning agents onto rapidly spinning single wafers and spins them off at the edge where baffle plates within the system collect the water, acidic and alkaline chemicals, and volatile solvents (the process for cleaning 200-millimeter wafers immerses the entire cassette). A large fab may have 20-30 such wet benches. With up to 12 stations per wet bench and exhaust from each chamber requiring several exhaust systems, the SALIX scrubber eliminates the need for elaborate change-over modules to avoid deposition in the pipes. It is more cost-effective and efficient at preventing clogging than conventional approaches used to separate and extract the acids, alkalines and solvents in the exhausts which require separate suction to prevent particle buildup and condensation within the pipes.

In contrast, SALIX removes the harmful substances from the gas stream directly at their point of origin using a two-stage scrubber process of chemical and physical absorption, and can treat up to 3600 m3/h of raw gas. Separate inlets feed the harmful gases from the wet bench process chambers into a SALIX pre-scrubber that pre-cleans the gas using spray nozzles. Next the waste gases pass into the first scrubber stage and then a second stage that uses a different scrubbing liquid. The remaining clean gas then can be released safely into the air without any danger to the technology or the environment. Because the SALIX system does not require any air dilution, the clean air remains in the clean room, further reducing cost.

Dr. Guy Davies, director of the Waste Gas Abatement business unit at DAS Environmental Expert explained, “When a global foundry based in Taiwan came to us seeking a better solution to treat water-soluble exhaust gases from a wet bench application, we installed SALIX as a first-of-its-kind point-of-use system. It has been running there since January of this year and, after six months of operation, emissions measurements show zero harmful substances in the exhaust. One SALIX system per wet bench is all that’s needed, and just one pipe for the cleaned exhaust. Salix “offers a smaller footprint with no switching boxes needed, and is far more cost-effective and efficient than central scrubbers for treating processes that create water-soluble waste gases. We believe our proven SALIX solution, which is SEMI S2 international and German TA-Luft standards compliant, opens new markets for point-of-use scrubbers in the semiconductor, LED, PV and FPD industries. In fact, we have seen increasing interest in SALIX and already have received multiple inquiries from U.S. customers. In addition, we are using the evaluation results for further process-based optimization and have developed a custom fit bypass function that will enable production to continue with no interruption.

DAS also announced it has added Technica, U.S.A. as a new local service partner to deliver faster response time for service and maintenance for U.S. customers.

Executives from the world’s leading microelectronics companies will meet with delegates representing Vietnamese government, academia, research, and industry to explore and discuss the key strategies and opportunities in the growing Vietnam semiconductor industry at the SEMI Vietnam Semiconductor Strategy Summit. The Summit will be held on September 9-10 at the InterContinental Asiana Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. The event includes an optional tour of the Saigon Hi-Tech Park where Intel’s assembly and packaging plant is located, followed by a one-day executive conference and networking event.

Following Intel’s successful $1 billion in manufacturing investment in Ho Chi Minh City, and the government’s recent decision to invest in a 200mm/0.18 micron front-end fab, Vietnam will become an alternative design and production location for electronics and semiconductor manufacturers in Southeast Asia.  The executive event will bring together the key decision-makers shaping the future of the industry in Vietnam and help forge the connections and relationships that will drive further growth over the next decade and beyond.  A featured presentation will provide perspectives on infrastructure and technology requirements for the new 200mm fab presented by executives from M+W and FabMax.

While both the Vietnamese and Ho Chi Minh City governments have made investments in both front-end and back-end semiconductor manufacturing a priority, advancing the semiconductor industry in Vietnam will also require development of the local supply chain, allocation of water and energy resources, a growing skilled workforce, partnerships with established microelectronic markets, and other infrastructure needs.

The SEMI Vietnam Semiconductor Strategy Summit is organized by SEMI and co-organized by the Saigon Hi-Tech Park (SHTP) and the Ho Chi Minh City Semiconductor Industry Association (HSIA). Participation in the SEMI Vietnam Semiconductor Strategy Summit is available exclusively through corporate sponsorship or by invitation.

Current sponsors include Kulicke & Soffa, Millice, KLA-Tencor, Disco, Advantest, and FabMax.  Several sponsorship categories are provided that offer different levels exposure and benefits.  For additional information on corporate sponsorships and to inquire about an invitation, please contact [email protected] or visit www.semi.org/vietnam