Category Archives: SST

Dialog Semiconductor plc, a provider of highly integrated power management, audio, AC/DC and short-range wireless technologies today announced that Richard Beyer, appointed to the board in February this year, as an independent non-executive director, will succeed Gregorio Reyes as chairman of the board. Greg will continue to serve as a board member.

Beyer, 64, was the chairman and CEO of Freescale Semiconductor from March 2008 to June 2012, subsequently retiring from the board in April this year. Prior to this, he held successive positions as CEO and director of Intersil Corporation, Elantec Semiconductor and FVC.com. He has also held senior leadership positions at VLSI Technology and National Semiconductor Corporation and served as an officer in the US Marine Corps. In 2012, he was chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association Board of Directors and served for three years as a member of the US Department of Commerce’s Manufacturing Council. He currently serves on the Board of Micron Technology Inc.

Dialog’s board said that Reyes has been an excellent Chairman, presiding in that position over the last six consecutive years of revenue growth and significant increase in shareholder return. He steps down as chairman on the high note of the positively received acquisition of iWatt Inc. earlier this month.

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.

 

Cree, Inc. announces that its 1200 V SiC MOSFETs are being incorporated into the latest advanced power supplies from Delta Elektronika BV. Delta Elektronika demonstrated a 21 percent decrease in overall power supply losses and a reduction in component count by up to 45 percent when compared to power supply products using traditional silicon technology.

Since 1959, Netherlands-based Delta Elektronika BV has produced power supplies for a range of industrial applications, such as specialized equipment used in factories, automation and industrial power conversion. Its power supplies typically provide high efficiency with low noise levels and are well known for their long operating lifespan.

“We are pleased to have Delta Elektronika BV as one of the volume adopters of our newest generation of SiC MOSFETs,” said Cengiz Balkas, general manager, Cree Power and RF. “Delta Elektronika BV has a half-century legacy of producing some of the most reliable, efficient and compact power supplies on the market. The industrial power supply market, which values efficiency, reliability and power density, is a key market for SiC MOSFET technology. Our new second-generation SiC MOSFET portfolio, which now includes a 160 m-Ohm MOSFET for the 5-10 kW market, is receiving strong market pull.”

Introduced in March 2013, Cree’s second-generation SiC MOSFETs have been well received throughout the power industry and are experiencing an increasing rate of adoption in several key applications, including a design-in at a major manufacturer’s next-generation, highly efficient PV inverters. With SiC, power supply manufacturers are able to reduce their component count to help improve reliability while maintaining or improving the power supply’s efficiency. Improving power density can also lead to reductions in the size, weight, volume and in some cases, even the cost of power supplies. SiC has been demonstrated to achieve more than twice the power density than typical silicon technology in standard power supply designs.

After a flat year in 2012, global purchasing of semiconductors by the world’s top electronic brands is set to return to growth in 2013, as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics contend to claim the title of biggest spender.

The total available market, or TAM, for semiconductor spending by major original equipment manufacturers (OEM) in 2013 will rise to $265.2 billion this year, up 4.2 percent from $254.4 billion in 2012, according to a Semiconductor Spend Analysis Market Tracker Report from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS). Spending by year-end will be at its highest level in six years, with expenditures in 2014 forecast to make another modest jump to $279.4 billion.

This top OEM semiconductor spending TAM represents about 83 percent of the total semiconductor market of $318.8 billion, as valued by the IHS Application Market Forecast Tool (AMFT).

If internal chip consumption within companies is excluded, the served available market for semiconductor spending, or SAM, will equate to an amount slightly lower than the TAM, at $241.3 billion in 2013.

As IHS announced in 2012, Apple is set to maintain leadership in the OEM semiconductor spending SAM in 2013. However, when also accounting for consumption of internally produced chips, Samsung will take the lead in terms of TAM this year.

“Depending on the metric used, either Samsung or Apple will be the top chip spender for 2013,” said Myson Robles-Bruce, senior analyst for semiconductor spend & design activity at IHS. “Either way, the honor does not merely signify bragging rights but also carries attendant overtones of prestige and influence, with the incumbent leader often tacitly acknowledged by all others as the industry’s top semiconductor spender.”

Other OEMs that make an appearance in both TAM and SAM lists—rankings vary depending on the roster—include Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Sony, Dell, Cisco Systems, Panasonic, Toshiba and Asustek Computer.

Wireless is king, but computer platforms still matter

Not surprisingly, the greatest share of spending this year will be in wireless communications, where Samsung and Apple lord over other players. Wireless alone is forecast to gobble up 26 percent—approximately $62 billion—of total top OEM semiconductor SAM. Wireless is also expected to be the highest growth market in 2013 after an annual projected expansion of 12.8 percent.

Within the wireless segment, handsets continue to be the single largest market, with OEM chip spending in 2013 expected to reach $46.7 billion. Media tablets are next at $8.2 billion, exceeding wireless infrastructure for the first time after the latter falls this year to $7.1 billion.

After wireless, computer platforms representing PCs and similar computing devices collectively represent the next-largest segment, forecast to take up 23 percent of OEM chip spending. China, which became the world’s biggest market for PC shipments last year, continues to account for a hefty part of PC-related chip spending even as the overall global computer market has slowed.

However, it should be noted that if the computer platforms segment is combined with the computer peripherals market, it becomes the largest single semiconductor market, beating wireless.

Following wireless and the computer platforms segment are the other smaller markets that take up the rest of OEM chip spending. In decreasing size, these segments are consumer, computer peripherals, automotive, industrial and wired communications, with share portions for each ranging from 6 to 15 percent.

Among semiconductor components, OEM chip spending this year will be largest in logic integrated circuits (IC) at nearly $75 billion, followed by memory ICs at $44 billion. The rest of the categories being tracked include analog ICs, discrete chips, microcomponent ICs, optical semiconductors, and sensors and actuators.

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor equipment posted $1.33 billion in orders worldwide in June 2013 (three-month average basis) and a book-to-bill ratio of 1.10, according to the June EMDS Book-to-Bill Report published today by SEMI.   A book-to-bill of 1.10 means that $110 worth of orders were received for every $100 of product billed for the month.

The three-month average of worldwide bookings in June 2013 was $1.33 billion. The bookings figure is 0.7 percent higher than the final May 2013 level of $1.32 billion, and is 6.6 percent lower than the June 2012 order level of $1.42 billion.

The three-month average of worldwide billings in June 2013 was $1.21 billion. The billings figure is 1.4 percent lower than the final May 2013 level of $1.22 billion, and is 21.4 percent lower than the June 2012 billings level of $1.54 billion.

“The SEMI book-to-bill ratio has been above parity for six consecutive months and bookings in the quarter ending in June are 20 percent above the quarter ending in March,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI.  "As recently announced, we anticipate that total worldwide equipment spending will decline by low single-digits this year and rebound with a double-digit growth rate in 2014.”

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 2013

968.0

1,076.0

1.11

February 2013

974.7

1,073.5

1.10

March 2013

991.0

1,103.3

1.11

April 2013

1,086.3

1,173.9

1.08

May 2013 (final)

1,223.4

1,321.3

1.08

June 2013 (prelim)

1,206.8

1,329.9

1.10

Source: SEMI, July 2013


The data contained in this release were compiled by David Powell, Inc., an independent financial services firm, without audit, from data submitted directly by the participants. SEMI and David Powell, Inc. assume no responsibility for the accuracy of the underlying data.

SEMI is the global industry association serving the nano- and micro-electronic manufacturing supply chains.. SEMI maintains offices in Bangalore, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Grenoble, Hsinchu, Moscow, San Jose, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.semi.org.

A new generation of thin hard disk drives (HDD) only 5.0 and 7.0mm thick are expected to enjoy fast sales growth in coming years, as mobile computers including ultrathin PCs and PC tablets drive up demand by a factor of more than 25 from 2012 to 2017.

The combined shipments of 5.0- and 7.0-millimeter HDDs used in mobile PCs will reach 133 million units by 2017, up from just 5 million last year, according to a Storage Space Brief from information and analytics provider IHS (NYSE: IHS).

Lighter in weight and thinner in breadth, the 5.0- and 7.0mm models will form a new class of ultraslim HDDs that are forecast to eventually displace the much thicker 9.5-mm drives that currently rule the industry. Shipments of the thicker 9.5-mm HDDs for mobile PCs will deteriorate to 79 million in 2017, down from 245 million units in 2012.

Both the 5.0- and 7.0-mm HDD products will see increasing adoption starting this year, along with another form of storage device known as the hybrid HDD, in which a NAND flash component or so-called cache solid-state drive (SSD) is joined with the hard drive within a single storage enclosure.

“Use of these new thin HDDs and hybrid HDDs will proliferate because these devices are smaller in size and have the capability to improve overall storage performance— important variables in an age that emphasizes smaller form factors as well as optimal speed at affordable prices,” said Fang Zhang, storage systems analyst at IHS. “Both the thinner HDDs along with hybrid HDDs could even start finding acceptance in ultrathin PCs and tablet PCs—two products that now mostly use solid-state drives as their storage element. Hard disks have lost market share to SSDs, which offer better performance and can be more easily used to achieve a thinner and lighter form factor crucial to tablets and ultrathin PCs.”

This year, for instance, the total SSD shipments will climb nearly 90 percent to 64.6 million units, while HDD shipments will decline 5 percent to 545.8 million units. However, the new and thinner HDDs eventually could stem losses of the hard disk space, especially if their costs can fall to 10-15 percent of a tablet or to 10-20 percent of an ultrathin PC, IHS believes.

These cost thresholds are important because they could be instrumental in persuading tablet and ultrathin PC brands to consider 5.0- and 7.0-mm. hard disks as possible alternatives to the SSDs now used as the predominant storage element. Solid-state drives are relatively expensive at present compared to other storage types and cut into the overall margins of computer and tablet makers, so the use of more economical storage alternatives that boost the bottom line of makers would make a persuasive argument to undertake a switch.

HDD manufacturers jump into the fray

All three manufacturers of hard disk drives—U.S.-based Western Digital Corp. and Seagate Technology, as well as Toshiba of Japan—will have their own product offerings for the new and thinner HDDs.

Western Digital fired the opening salvo in April, announcing it had started shipping the 5.0-mm WD Blue ultraslim HDD and the Black SSHD—a solid-state hybrid drive with a hard drive component alongside the cache SSD—to select industry distributors as well as original equipment manufacturer customers.

Western Digital claims that the 500-gigabyte capacities of the two models will reduce weight by as much as 30 percent compared to a 9.5-mm HDD, with a circuit board utilizing cellphone miniaturization technology able to maximize the mechanical sway space in the hard drive to ensure shock resistance.

Western Digital then announced in June shipments of the world’s currently thinnest 1-terabyte drive—the 7.0-mm. WD Blue—with both Acer and Asus likely to use the product in their upcoming ultrathin PCs.

For its part, Western Digital archrival Seagate announced also in June it had shipped 5.0-mm HDDs to Asus, Dell and Lenovo for their ultrathin PCs for the second half of 2013. Seagate says its 500-gigabyte hard drive occupies 25 percent less space than the company’s 7.0-mm HDD.

Reacting to the developments from Western Digital and Seagate, Toshiba said it would ship a 7.0-mm solid-state hybrid drive (SSHD) in 320- and 500-gigabyte configurations, likewise by the end of June.

Previously, Toshiba only had a 9.5-mm SSHD of up to 750 gigabytes.

As LED lighting becomes an $80 billion industry, the market for the epitaxial wafers (epi-wafers) LEDs are made from will grow to $4 billion in 2020, according to Lux Research.

The vast majority of these epi-wafers are gallium nitride (GaN)-on-sapphire today. GaN-on-silicon is the leading emerging technology with a strong economic allure – silicon is just one-eighth the cost of a sapphire substrate – but technical challenges will limit it to only a 10% market share in 2020. GaN-on-silicon carbide (SiC), championed by Cree, will grow to 18 percent market share.

epi wafer market

“Silicon is already widely used for electronics, and some LED die manufacturers are hoping to take advantage of silicon substrates,” said Pallavi Madakasira, Lux Research Analyst and lead author of the report titled, “Dimming the Hype: GaN-on-Si Fails to Outshine Sapphire by 2020.”

“But GaN-on-Si is more prone to cracking than GaN-on-sapphire, and mitigating this mismatch is expensive,” she added.

Lux Research analysts studied the market for GaN-on-sapphire, GaN-on-SiC, GaN-on-bulk GaN, and GaN-on-Si epi-wafers, evaluating each technology’s economic prospects as the industry moves to larger wafer sizes. Among their findings:

  • Choice and cost of LEDs will determine adoption. Where GaN-on-sapphire is suited to all applications, GaN-on-bulk GaN will be relegated to niche commercial lighting and GaN-on-Si, with unproven performance, will be better suited to cost-sensitive residential applications.
  • Four-inch wafers will rule, though six-inch wafers start to come into vogue. Four-inch wafers will peak at 62 percent market share with $2.1 billion in 2017 sales. Later, the LED industry will move towards 6” epi wafers, which will take a 35% share, equivalent to $1.4 billion, in 2020.
  • Technology will advance sapphire substrates. Sapphire substrate manufacturing technology has advanced significantly with specialists such as Rubicon and Monocrystal demonstrating substrates up to 12 inch in diameter. New methods like hydride vapor phase epitaxy (HVPE) will further improve throughput and cut costs, keeping sapphire highly competitive for the rest of the decade.

The report, titled “Dimming the Hype: GaN-on-Si Fails to Outshine Sapphire by 2020,” is part of the Lux Research Energy Electronics Intelligence service.

In 3D integration, wafers are thinned, stacked and connected to one another with through silicon vias (TSVs). The process of wafer thinning and TSV formation typically involves the use of a wafer bonding/debonding technology, where the wafers are bonded onto a carrier substrate – either silicon or glass – processed, and then debonded. The bonding/debonding step can be tricky because the bond has to be strong enough to withstand relatively high temperature processes and polishing steps, but not so strong as to make debonding difficult. It’s also critical that minimal stress be introduced to the device wafer during the debonding step (which can involve sliding or peeling), and that no residue remain. Room temperature debonding is also desirable.  

A variety of techniques and materials have been developed to successfully achieve bonding/debonding, but Tony Flaim, chief technology officer of Brewer Science (Rolla, MO) says they are still too complicated. Brewer Science introduced the ZoneBOND technology in the 2008/2009 timeframe, and it has been implemented by tool suppliers such as EVG and SUSS. In an interview at The ConFab in June, Flaim said: “This is one of the industry’s first methods for separating the carrier from the bonded pair under low stress, low temperature conditions. It can be done at room temperature. We’ve had customers adopt that technology and are using it for some low volume production.”

High volume manufacturing of 3D integration with TSVs might not occur for another two years. To date, TSVs have been primarily used in limited applications such as image sensors where back-to-front contact is required. The first true stacked, 3D integrated device to go into production will likely be the Hybrid Memory Cube sometime next year.

“The industry is at best in low volume production with things like high density interposers and a few stacked devices, but for the most part we really haven’t seen anyone going into high volume manufacturing with the technology,” Flaim said.  “What we’re trying to do, until that time arrives, is move on to a third generation of technology that will basically involve all the steps in the process and simplifying more than they are now.” He said that with ZoneBond and competing technologies, they have six basic process steps, but at a more detailed level, you can see as many as 20-25 steps. “Some of those steps are lengthy, they can be minutes or even up to hours in some cases to perform. We believe that for temporary wafer bonding technology and in fact for 2.5D and 3D integration to occur, we’re going to have to have a much simpler, more reliable, more cost-effective process. That’s really our goal for the next two years,” Flaim said.

In terms of ideal process temperature, Flaim said the bulk of their customers are working in the range of 250-260°C, but it’s clear that they want to go higher. Dielectric cure processes and deposition processes, for example, would yield better material properties when performed at a higher temperature.  “We’re trying to move our whole materials set to have thermal stability at 280, 300°C or maybe even beyond. But the trick is still getting them back apart. That’s where ZoneBond and some of the other release technologies that we’re working on now will really provide the advantage.  You decouple the thermal stability from how you separate from the stack. You can still be operating under a low stress, low temperature condition when you take the bonded structure apart, but the materials within the structure are surviving the high temperature.”

See the video interview of Tony Flaim at The ConFab by clicking here.

Zvi Or-Bach, President & CEO of MonolithIC 3D Inc. blogs about an ASML presentation from Semicon West. This is a follow up to a previous post: "Dimensional Scaling and the SRAM Bit-Cell."

I just downloaded the ASML presentation from Semicon West2013 site – ASML’s NXE Platform Performance and Volume Introduction. Slide #5  – IC manufacture’s road maps – says it all.

Embedded SRAM will scale from 0.09µm² at 22-20nm node to 0.06µm² at 11-10nm node. In other words only 30% reduction instead of the 4x reduction expected of historical dimension scaling, to roughly 0.02µm² !!!

In our previous blog that followed ISSCC 2013 we saw some early indication of this slowdown.  Yet we were still surprised to realize how bad it really is. This might explain why after resisting IBM and other pushes for embedded DRAM, Intel announced few month ago that its Haswell processor will incorporate embedded DRAM after all.

Another point from this ASML slide is the adaption of monolithic 3D by the NAND Flash vendors. We believe this is a start of a trend, and that logic vendors has now one more reason to follow it.

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.