Category Archives: SST

Ultra-pure sputtering targets for UHD screens

August 8, 2013

Transistors in ultra-high definition displays (UHD) possess particularly fine structures. Only extremely pure sputtering targets are suitable for use as the input materials for the fine conductor paths. “UHD-ready” will be the motto when Plansee present their ultra-pure coating materials at Touch Taiwan.

Ultra-high definition is a digital video format that transmits images at widths of up to 4000 pixels. Display manufacturers are now supplying the necessary hardware in the form of UHD screens. The advent of UHD technology is bringing with it more stringent requirements with respect to the purity of the materials used, such as molybdenum.

Molybdenum is a key component of the layer system in a thin film transistor and helps to determine the color with which an LED is illuminated. There are several million of these transistors in a single UHD screen. Ulrich Lausecker, Head of the Coating Business Unit at Plansee explains: “Any foreign particle in the thin film material is huge in relation to the fine transistor structures. Even the slightest contamination of the molybdenum layer can cause whole pixels to fail.”

The company is one of the leading manufacturers of molybdenum sputtering targets. When processed, these targets form key layers in the transistor system. Plansee is the only manufacturer to supply molybdenum at a guaranteed purity of 99.97 percent. As a rule, the material is even purer than this. Which means that Plansee’s sputtering targets are ready for ultra-high definition technology.

In-house production guarantees the highest levels of material purity

This is made possible by the proprietary production process. At Plansee, this starts with molybdenum trioxide, in other words shortly after the ore has been processed. In-house reduction processes then allow to convert this to extremely pure molybdenum powder. And Plansee is also responsible for further downstream process steps such as pressing, sintering and forming sputtering targets. Before the sputtering targets are delivered to the customers, Plansee bond them in their own machine shops in Asia.

Because all the production steps are kept in house, Plansee is able to control the quality of the material right from the start in a way that no other target manufacturer can.

“Even the raw material itself comes from part of our family,” said Lausecker. “The Plansee Group has a 14 percent stake in the Chilean company Molymet, the largest molybdenum ore processor in the world.”

Appleâs shift in chip manufacturing strategy boosts semiconductor foundry business

August 8, 2013

apple logo In an illustration of the massive power it wields in the electronics supply chain, Apple Inc.’s migration of the production of key semiconductors from Samsung to pure-play foundries will single-handedly boost the growth of the chip contract manufacturing market this year.

By the end of the year, pure-play semiconductor foundry market revenue is forecast to rise 21 percent compared to 2012, according to the new IHS report entitled: “Low-Cost Tablet Processor Market Computes New Growth” from information and analytics provider IHS.

In contrast, takings for the overall semiconductor industry will expand by a more staid 5 percent.

The pure-play foundry industry is already on track to achieve such growth this year, with revenue amounting to $8.2 billion in the first quarter, up 4 percent from $7.9 billion in the fourth quarter last year, as shown in the attached figure. In comparison, the overall semiconductor market was down by 5 percent during the same period.

The foundry segment is also believed to have outperformed the rest of the industry in the second quarter when final figures are released, and then go on to perform strongly for the second half.

Pure-play foundries are companies that exclusively perform contract manufacturing of chips for other semiconductor suppliers. Major companies in the pure-play foundry business include Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. and United Microelectronics Corp.

Apple takes apps processor business elsewhere

“The growth outlook for the pure-play foundry business has risen considerably in anticipation of Apple’s transition of its applications processor chip manufacturing to third-party manufacturers,” said Len Jelinek, director and chief analyst of semiconductor manufacturing at IHS. “Previously, Apple had relied on Samsung as the primary supplier of applications processor chips for the iPhone and iPad. However, Samsung is not considered a pure-play foundry. Instead, it is designated as an integrated device manufacturer (IDM)—a chip supplier that not only builds products but also possesses design capabilities and sells devices under its own brand name, functions not performed by foundries.”

Apple already has its own designs and does not need an IDM for its chips to be made, so it can just as easily move its semiconductors to a foundry.

“However, Apple’s anticipated shift is also the result of its well-publicized tiffs with Samsung over patent infringements on both makers’ smartphones that have strained relationships between the two,” Jelinek added.

Moving forward, Apple is likely to use a producer like TSMC, the largest foundry in the business, with $16.9 billion in revenue for 2012.

Wireless on the rise

While the overall semiconductor industry continues to be heavily dependent on components sold to the PC market, foundry players have hitched their revenue prospects to the rising fortunes of the wireless segment. As a result, revenue for foundries has been expanding steadily, while that for the overall chip industry has been less assured.

Threats and risks ahead

Although strong growth is projected in 2013 for foundry suppliers, several concerns abound that foundry players must monitor throughout the year.

Foundry suppliers must be aware of the global economy, as well as the inventory that their clients maintain. Should the world market sputter, consumer demand for electronic products will weaken, thereby impacting chip makers and foundries alike. If inventory grows out of control for foundry clients as it did in the second half of 2012, manufacturing run rates for foundries could decline significantly for the remaining six months of 2013 as their customers hold back on chip orders.

A rising threat to foundries is also coming from IDMs like Samsung and chipmaker Intel. For the first time, the top foundry suppliers are facing technological competition from IDMs—which means that the leading foundries are no longer in competition with just one another.

As several IDMs attempt to revamp their manufacturing models and move to new and more efficient lithographies, incumbent foundries will be forced to accelerate internal technology development. The race between the two rival groups will result in a shortening of technology cycles and fierce competition among participants. A company unsuccessful in execution will inevitably lose important market share and be weakened, or worse, forced out, IHS believes.

Ultimately the consumer will be the winner. Technological developments will provide designers the ability to integrate multiple functions onto a chip, offered at a unit cost that results in cheaper, yet more powerful consumer products.

Demand for key raw material set to double as LED market booms

August 7, 2013

Global demand for precursor, a material used in manufacturing of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), is set to more than double from 2012 to 2016, as the market for LED lighting booms, according to a new report entitled “Precursor for LED MOCVD–Market and Industry Analysis,” from Displaybank, now part of IHS.

The market for precursor used in the metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) manufacturing process for making LEDs will rise to 69 tons in 2016, up a notable 114 percent from 32 tons in 2012.

“The boom in the precursor market reflects the rising operating rate of MOCVD as the LED lighting market grows,” said Richard Son, senior LED analyst at IHS.

Precursor is a core material that ensures the optimal light efficiency for each LED epi layer. It is used in the MOCVD process, which is the most important process in manufacturing LED chips. Major precursors include trimethylgallium (TMGa), trimethylindium (TMIn), trimethyl aluminum (TMA), triethylgallium (TEGa) and C2Mg2. Among these, TMGa is the most widely used and commands about 94 percent of total demand.

Global shipments of MOCVD equipment are on the rise, with shipments expected to climb by 17 percent in 2013.

The largest buyers of MOCVD equipment—South Korea, Taiwan and China—account for about 80 percent of the global demand of precursors. China, which is generating the highest growth in installation of MOCVD equipment among the three countries, is expected to make up 45 percent of the global demand of precursors in 2016.

In the nascent stage of the LED market, Dow Chemical Co. was the unrivaled leader in the precursor market. However, with the recent growth in precursor demand, new players have been investing in R&D and manufacturing facilities while aggressively breaking into the market with low prices for similar-quality product. Such developments will intensify competition further among precursor makers.

Magnetic switching simplified

August 7, 2013

An international team of researchers has described a new physical effect that could be used to develop more efficient magnetic chips for information processing. The quantum mechanical effect makes it easier to produce spin-polarized currents necessary for the switching of magnetically stored information. The research findings were published online on 28 July in the high-impact journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Random-access memory is the short-term memory in computers. It buffers the programs and files currently in use in electronic form, in numerous tiny capacitors. As capacitors discharge over time, they have to be recharged regularly to ensure that no data are lost. This costs time and energy, and an unplanned power failure can result in data being lost for good.

Magnetic Random Access Memories (MRAMs), on the other hand, store information in tiny magnetic areas. This is a fast process that functions without a continuous power supply. In spite of this, MRAMs have yet to be implemented on a large scale, as their integration density is still too low, and they use too much energy, are difficult to produce, and cost too much.

One reason for this is that spin-polarized currents, or spin currents for short, are needed to switch the magnetic areas of the MRAMs. Spin is the intrinsic angular momentum of electrons that gives materials their magnetic properties, and it can point in two directions. Spin currents are electric currents that possess only one of these two spin types. Similar to the way in which the Earth’s magnetic field affects the needle of a compass, a current of one of the spin types influences a magnetic layer and can cause it to flip.

To produce spin currents up to now, the desired spin type was filtered from normal electric current. This required special filter structures and high current densities. Thanks to the new effect identified by researchers from Jülich, Barcelona, Grenoble, and Zurich, magnetic information could now be switched more easily.

"We no longer need spin filters. Instead, we produce the spin current directly where it will be used. All that is needed is a layer stack made of cobalt and platinum," says Dr. Frank Freimuth from the Peter Grünberg Institute and the Institute for Advanced Simulation at Forschungszentrum Jülich. This reduces the amount of space required, makes the system more robust, and may simplify the production of magnetic chips.

An electric current, conducted through the stack at the interface, separates the spins in the platinum layer and transports only one spin type into the magnetic cobalt layer. This creates a torque in this layer that can reverse the magnetization. "Spin torques had already been observed in double layer systems in the past," says the physicist, who is part of the Young Investigators Group on Topical Nanoelectronics headed by Prof. Yuriy Mokrousov. "The fact that we have conclusively explained for the first time how they are created is a scientific breakthrough, because this will enable us to produce them selectively and investigate them in more detail."

The researchers identified two mechanisms that combine to produce the new effect, which they have dubbed ‘spin-orbit torque’: spin-orbit coupling and the exchange interaction. Spin-orbit coupling is a well-known relativistic quantum phenomenon and the reason why all electron spins of one type move from the platinum to the cobalt layer. Within the cobalt layer, the layer’s magnetic orientation then interacts with the spins via the exchange interaction.

The researchers tested their theory successfully in experiments. Their next step is to calculate the effect in other materials with stronger spin-torque coupling to find out whether the effect is even more apparent in other material combinations.

Second quarter shows increase in silicon wafer shipments

August 7, 2013

Worldwide silicon wafer area shipments increased during the second quarter 2013 when compared to first quarter 2013 area shipments, according to the SEMI Silicon Manufacturers Group (SMG) in its quarterly analysis of the silicon wafer industry.

Total silicon wafer area shipments were 2,390 million square inches during the most recent quarter, a 12.3 percent increase from the 2,128 million square inches shipped during the previous quarter. New quarterly total area shipments are 2.3 percent lower than second quarter 2012 shipments.

"Total quarterly silicon shipment volumes accelerated in the most recent quarter in contrast to the first quarter” said Byungseop (Brad) Hong, chairman of SEMI SMG and director of Global Marketing at LG Siltron. “As such, silicon shipment volumes for the first half of this year are trending at a slightly higher level than the first half of 2012.”

Quarterly Silicon Area Shipment Trends
Semiconductor Silicon Shipments* – Millions of Square Inches

	*Million of Square Inches*
	*Q2 2012*	*Q1 2013*	*Q2 2013*
*TOTAL*	2,447	2,128	2,390

*Shipments are for semiconductor applications only and do not include solar applications

Silicon wafers are the fundamental building material for semiconductors, which in turn, are vital components of virtually all electronics goods, including computers, telecommunications products, and consumer electronics. The highly engineered thin round disks are produced in various diameters (from one inch to 12 inches) and serve as the substrate material on which most semiconductor devices or "chips" are fabricated.

All data cited in this release is inclusive of polished silicon wafers, including virgin test wafers, epitaxial silicon wafers, and non-polished silicon wafers shipped by the wafer manufacturers to the end-users.

The Silicon Manufacturers Group acts as an independent special interest group within the SEMI structure and is open to SEMI members involved in manufacturing polycrystalline silicon, monocrystalline silicon or silicon wafers (e.g., as cut, polished, epi, etc.). The purpose of the group is to facilitate collective efforts on issues related to the silicon industry including the development of market information and statistics about the silicon industry and the semiconductor market.

SEMI is the global industry association serving the nano- and micro-electronic manufacturing supply chains.

Compact linear piezo nanopositioning stage

August 7, 2013

PI (Physik Instrumente) L.P., a manufacturer of nanopositioning equipment — offers the LPS-45 series of piezo positioning stages manufactured by PI subsidiary PI miCos.

This low profile linear translation stage is driven by a PIshift inertia-type piezo motor. The closed-loop stage is equipped with a high precision optical linear encoder providing for nanometer-level repeatability. An open-loop version and vacuum compatible and non-magnetic versions are also offered.

The PIShift piezo inertia drive is very quiet, due to its high operating frequency of 20 kHz. It provides high holding forces of 10 N. The drive principle works similar to the classic tablecloth trick, a cyclical alternation of static and sliding friction between a moving runner and the drive element.

When at rest, the maximum clamping force is available, with no holding current and consequently no heat generation.

PI provides a large variety of nanopositioning stages, based on several piezo-motor techniques, as well as classical electromagnetic drives.

Despite the very low profile of only 0.8” (20 mm) and compact dimensions, the stage offers a standard travel range of 30 mm (1.2”) and can be scaled up for longer travels, if needed.

PI’s precision linear translation stages are of great value for precision alignment in photonics, semiconductor, bio/nanotech applications as well as in scientific research.

Peregrine Semiconductor and LG team up for antenna tuning in Optimus G Pro smartphone

August 7, 2013

Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation, a fabless provider of high-performance radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), and LG Electronics today announced they have teamed up to develop the high-performance antenna tuning design solution in the LG Optimus G Pro smartphone that was recently introduced to the Korean market. The Optimus G Pro features a 5.5-inch full High Definition (HD) In-Plane Switching (IPS) display—the largest display available on a LG smartphone—and it is a mere 9.4 mm thick, meeting the growing demand for smartphones with large screens in a thin-and-slim form factor. Peregrine’s DuNE technology optimizes the performance of the main antenna by bringing the best of what its UltraCMOS and DuNE technologies offer—namely, optimized handset efficiency, data rate, call integrity, and battery life. By enabling one antenna to more efficiently cover multiple frequency bands, the DuNE-based tuning solution enables the Optimus G Pro to support a subset of the more than 40 frequency bands available with 4G LTE.

“Peregrine is thrilled to announce that we have teamed up with industry giant LG for their latest offering,” said Dylan Kelly, vice president of Peregrine’s Mobile Wireless Solutions business unit. “LG continues to develop innovative products for the premium LTE smartphone market, and the release of the Optimus G Pro in Korea is the latest example. Teaming up with LG further validates that Peregrine’s DuNE technology is ideal for 4G LTE smartphones.”

Nanotechnology battery design gets boost from aligned carbon nanotubes

August 7, 2013

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a new flexible nano-scaffold for rechargeable lithium ion batteries that could help make cell phone and electric car batteries last longer.

The research, published in Advanced Materials ("Aligned Carbon Nanotube-Silicon Sheets: A Novel Nano-architecture for Flexible Lithium Ion Battery Electrodes"), shows the potential of manufactured sheets of aligned carbon nanotubes coated with silicon, a material with a much higher energy storage capacity than the graphite composites typically used in lithium ion batteries.

“Putting silicon into batteries can produce a huge increase in capacity—10 times greater,” said Dr. Philip Bradford, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science at NC State. “But adding silicon can also create 10 times the problems.”

One significant challenge in using silicon is that it swells as lithium ion batteries discharge. As the batteries cycle, silicon can break off from the electrode and float around (known as pulverization) instead of staying in place, making batteries less stable.

When the silicon-coated carbon nanotubes were aligned in one direction like a layer of drinking straws laid end to end, the structure allowed for controlled expansion so that the silicon is less prone to pulverization, said Xiangwu Zhang, associate professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science at NC State.

“There’s a huge demand for batteries for cell phones and electric vehicles, which need higher energy capacity for longer driving distances between charges,” Zhang said. “We believe this carbon nanotube scaffolding potentially has the ability to change the industry, although technical aspects will have to be worked out. The manufacturing process we’re using is scalable and could work well in commercial production.”

SSD market scores big in Q1, thanks to Ultrabooks and PC tablets

August 7, 2013

CORRECTION: The original version of this article stated that LSI Corp. reported shipments of 400,000 PCI Express SSDs from the start of the year through April. LSI actually posted 40,000 shipments during the period. A corrected version of the article is below. Solid State Technology regrets the error.

Solid-state drives (SSD) got a huge push in the first quarter from greatly expanded usage in ultrathin/Ultrabook PCs as well as in PC tablets, where shipment volume to those sectors tripled within a year’s time in a mighty display of growth, according to the latest Storage market tracker report from information and analytics provider IHS.

SSD shipments to ultrathins and Ultrabook PCs reached 5.9 million units from January to March this year, up more than threefold from 1.9 million units during the same three-month period in the first quarter of 2012. SSDs also made a sizable splash in the PC tablet sector, where shipments hit 1.6 million units, likewise surging by a factor of three from just 542,000 units.

SSD shipments were actually up in virtually every segment where the electronic disks with no moving mechanical parts are used. SSD deployment rose not only in the enterprise segment governing business, but also staged strong gains in the various non-enterprise fields covering desktop PCs, notebook PCs and the industrial market for applications such as aerospace, automotive and medical electronics.

All told, SSD shipments in the first quarter amounted to 11.5 million units, up 92 percent from 6.0 million the same time a year ago, as shown in the attached Figure 1. The shipments include standalone SSDs as well as the NAND flash component used together with hard disk drives to form cache SSDs or hybrid drives.

“The SSD market enjoyed big results in the first quarter as both the consumer and enterprise markets ramped up their use of machines that made use of the drives,” said Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS. “Most notably, SSD attach rates climbed in ultrathin/Ultrabook PCs where SSDs are the de facto storage medium, and also in PC tablets where productivity options differentiate them from media tablets.”

HDD market flourishes in enterprise but stumbles in client/consumer sector

Meanwhile, the hard disk drive (HDD) market enjoyed some success of its own via the enterprise segment. Shipments here amounted to 16.0 million units, up from 14.9 million in the first quarter of 2012.

HDD enterprise demand is expected to continue growing because of the exploding use of data among consumers, especially in music, video and social networking. Consumers’ needs, in turn, will necessitate cost-effective storage solutions on the part of data centers and cloud servers that store and serve up the data. HDDs are still considerably less expensive than solid-state drives, so their use remains assured despite uneven or dwindling market results at times.

The HDD market, however, is encountering challenges in the consumer PC segment. Total HDD consumer PC shipments fell to 93.3 million units in the first quarter, down from 105.3 million a year ago.

The HDD consumer PC space had worse results than either the HDD enterprise segment or the entire SSD consumer PC market, mainly because of poor sales of desktop and notebook PC on which the HDD market relies, weakened by intense competition from smartphones and tablets.

A promising application of HDDs, however, is in the video surveillance market, where hard drives will exceed other storage media, including SSDs and tape. Two types of HDDs are used at present for the video surveillance industry: dedicated DVR drives for traditional analog closed-circuit television (CCTV), and enterprise HDDs.

In all, HDD shipments in the first quarter amounted to 135.7 million units, down 7 percent from 145.5 million the same time a year ago.

SSD and HDD winners in Q1

Among companies, SSD manufacturers whose prospects have significantly improved given their stronger enterprise strategies include South Korea’s Samsung Electronics; California-based makers Intel, SanDisk and Seagate; and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies from Japan, a Western Digital company. Also staging a strong debut in the SSD space was LSI from Silicon Valley, which claimed shipments of 40,000 PCI Express SSDs from the start of the year through April.

New multi-chip-LEDs provide a broad bright blue color range

August 6, 2013

Colors are playing an increasingly important role in the automotive sector. Consumers can not only choose the exterior color of the vehicle, you can also tailor the interior lighting to the customer’s individual taste. Thanks to the very wide blue color range of the new RGB MultiLED from Osram Opto Semiconductors, lighting designers have a virtually unlimited choice of colors for ambient lighting, including customer-specific colors. Color design now covers cluster lighting to an increasing extent, notably in combined instruments such as speedometers and RPM indicators, in infotainment and GPS displays, as backlighting for switches and in accent, ambient and trim lighting. Vehicles are fast becoming objects of individual design.

The main feature of the new MultiLED from Osram is a very broad blue color range with a wavelength of 447 to 476nm and high brightness. Deep saturated blue tones can now be produced thanks to the use of three LED chips in red, green and blue (RGB). Other properties of the MultiLED, such as its integrated ESD (electrostatic discharge) protective diode (2 kilovolts), its improved corrosion resistance, and its longtime market availability, make these LEDs ideal for use in automobiles. The MultiLED was developed specifically for applications in the automotive sector and meets all the requirements of an automotive certified component.

OSRAM multi-chip LED

All shades of blue

The new MultiLED consists of a red chip, a green chip and a blue chip (RGB LED). At 370 millicandelas (mcd), the blue is much brighter than in other multi-chip LEDs on the market. This brightness is a significant advantage because the sensitivity of the human eye causes the color blue to be perceived as darker than it actually is.

"The new LED can offset this darker perception so that customer brightness requirements can be met for all color ranges," said David Rousseau, LED Product Marketing Manager at Osram Opto Semiconductors. "What’s more, a short-wave blue color has a pleasant saturated appearance. We have now succeeded in implementing this color range in an RGB LED version."

The three independently controllable LED chips in blue, red and green in the MultiLED are available in different brightness groups thanks to finely defined grouping (known as binning). They can be individually combined to produce a large color spectrum. All three chip colors are the product of leading-edge technology: blue and green in UX:3 technology, red in the latest thin-film technology. The light is extracted from the chip with very high efficiency, resulting in high luminous intensity. In the upper blue wavelength range, for example, a level of up to 560 millicandelas is achieved at an operating current of 20 mA. Luminous intensity in candelas (cd) corresponds to luminous flux in lumens (lm) emitted by a light source in a particular solid angle. The typical thermal resistance between the chip and the solder point is 127 K/W for blue and green, and 96 K/W for red.