Category Archives: Editors Picks

Next week is the semiconductor industry’s flagship technical conference show-and-tell: the 58th annual IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM, Dec. 10-12), this year held back on the West Coast at the San Francisco Hilton Union Square (and preceded by two days of short courses and tutorial sessions). Highlights of the IEDM 2012 technical program, which comprises some 220 presentations, include unveiling of Intel’s trigate manufacturing technology; a plethora of advances in memory technologies; high-performance logic on flexible plastic substrates; continuing advances in transistor scaling to teens and single-digit nodes; advancements in emerging new materials, wafer-level packaging, MEMS technologies and applications, and more.

Solid State Technology’s Pete Singer will be on site at IEDM 2012, and we’ll be getting input from bloggers and our industry friends. To kick things off, we’ve scanned the entire IEDM 2012 program to present a quick sampling of some of the more intriguing papers. Enjoy the slideshow!

GO TO FIRST SLIDE>>>

November 30, 2012 – With the advent of two new touch sensor technologies, more than 7.5% of the mobile phone market will use "in-cell touch" in 2012 and tablet PCs will see a 5% shipment share of "DITO film structure" technology, reports NPD DisplaySearch. In-cell touch’s market share is estimated to grow to 16.7% by 2018.

Apple’s iPhone 5 uses in-cell touch technology, while the iPad mini features a DITO film structure.

"These two new projected capacitive touch sensor structures enabled Apple to reduce the thickness and weight of the iPhone 5 and iPad mini," said Calvin Hsieh, research director, NPD DisplaySearch. "These factors contribute to the consumer demand for these products, but manufacturing the new sensors has proven problematic."

Apple sources the 4-in. 1136 × 640 (326 ppi) in-cell touch LCD from LG Display, Japan Display Inc., and Sharp under a license to use Apple’s in-cell touch patents, and these panel makers are forbidden to sell LCD panels of any size using Apple’s in-cell touch patents to other companies. Limited production, along with the challenges in producing the new sensors with strict performance requirements, have resulted in poor yield rates (70%-80% or less) in LCD panel manufacturing and a higher price for in-cell touch.

The iPad mini represents the first tablet PC display to incorporate a DITO film touch sensor, which is lighter and thinner than DITO glass (0.125 mm vs. 0.4 mm). However, there are challenges with production of the sensor on film and lamination since it is easily broken when stretched. Also, alignment of film sensors is more difficult than with rigid glass, especially for larger sizes. These challenges have resulted in low production yield rates, which have been a contributor to the higher entry price of $329 for the iPad mini. Other less-expensive tablet PCs use glass sensors or a one-glass solution with optical bonding.

"In-cell touch and DITO film offer some clear advantages, but at the expense of lower yield rates and higher costs — at least in the early stages of production," added Hsieh. "Apple has concluded that the benefits of thinner, lighter devices will be highly valued by consumers."

NPD DisplaySearch’s 2012 Touch Panel Market Analysis offers a comprehensive breakdown of touch panel technologies and their market forecasts through 2018.

Touch technology shipments by category in mobile phones. (Source: NPD DisplaySearch)

November 29, 2012 – Despite graphene’s promise as a material in future electronics with excellent properties in almost all applications, it still faces difficulties in market acceptance, according to a report from IDTechEx.

The firm calculates a $100M market for graphene in 2018, as the material seems to be reaching the peak of its hype cycle: prototypes and first-generation products have been launched; a mushrooming of start-up formations has occurred; and the industry has seen a flurry of seed and early-stage funding. Several companies are already within the second or third round of financing, and the second generation of products are being launched with more realistic assessment of the near- to medium-term market opportunity, according to Khasha Ghaffarzadeh, technology analyst at IDTechEx, and co-author of the report "Graphene: Analysis of Technology, Markets and Players 2013-2018."

Figure 1: The hype cycle of graphene. Graphene is hyped but it is moving past the peak of inflated expectations.
(Source: IDTechEx)

Depending on the number of layers, purity, oxygen content, crystallinity, and form (powder or sheet), the quality of the graphene can vary, and each can be placed on a quasi-empirical chart, in which the limiting cases are graphite, graphite oxide, graphene oxide, and graphene.

Figure 2: The many different graphene types can be categorized between the limiting cases of graphene oxide, graphene, graphite oxide, and graphite. The properties will different depending on where the graphene sits within this space.
(Source: IDTechEx)

Different manufacturing techniques are used, including micro-cleavage, chemical vapor deposition, liquid-phase exfoliation, and oxidization-reduction and plasma, with a trade-off between cost and scalability vs. graphene quality, says IDTechEx. Certain techniques may be better suited for high-volume applications with relaxed performance requirements, while others serve applications demanding high performance levels.

In many cases, the main strategy for graphene acceptance is as a replacement for existing materials in products such as carbon black, carbon fiber, graphite, carbon nanotubes, silver nanowires, ITO, silver flakes, copper nanoparticles, aluminum, silicon, GaAs, and ZnO.

Figure 3: Scalability, cost and graphene quality trends for different manufacturing techniques. (Source: IDTechEx)

The industry is now gearing up to move beyond research activities, and other applications are being developed, including RFID, smart packaging, supercapacitors, composites, ITO replacement, sensors, logic, and memory. The largest near-term market opportunity for graphene beyond R&D is in composites and energy storage applications, IDTechEx says. Graphene’s adoption in transparent conduction applications will be limited because it falls short both on cost and performance compared to other options, the firm says. Similarly graphene won’t find easy inroads into transistors due to its lack of bandgap and the high level of standards set by existing materials

November 28, 2012 – NPD DisplaySearch analyst Paul Gagnon took the pulse of consumer shoppers on Black Friday and came away with three observations: bargains are a priority, consumers want bigger upgrades, and Walmart flexed its muscles. He bases them on what apparently was firsthand experience standing in line like everyone else, plus "reports from colleagues in the industry."

— Consumers love bargains… Customers seemed to have their Black Friday TV-deal priorities in order thusly: price, size, brand, and little interest in any other feature. Gagnon noted Emerson 32-in. LCD TVs vanished at a $148 price point, but same-sized Samsung versions stood stacked on the floor largely untouched later on Friday even at $100 off. At a Best Buy later in the day he reports customers sought out a "shockingly low" priced ($179) Toshiba 40-in. TV, but upon learning they were sold out they resigned to next year’s Black Friday rather than seek a replacement. That suggests the motivation was far more on finding a good deal vs. really wanting a new TV — "which should be a wake-up call to the to the industry to not focus so much on promoting shocking prices to drive traffic," he writes.

— …but not "step-up" features. At the same time, Gagnon noted that there was little "chatter" and activity surrounding "step-up models" of TVs featuring improvements such as Smart TV, 3D, or LED technology. Over 90% of Chinese LCD TV shipments were LED backlit in 3Q12, but North America isn’t even at 50% yet and ranks near last in the world in terms of unit shipment share, he points out. " Do US consumers understand the feature, and just not care? Are retailers not doing an effective job of educating customers about the technology? Are the prices too high? Probably some combination of all of these factors is at play."

— Confirmed: Bigger is believed better. While consumers flocked to promotions of sub-$200 32-in. TVs, a lot of them also sought out bigger models (≥40-in.). Gagnon lists a number of notable Black Friday promotions this year for bigger-sized panels, in some cases with 50-in. models at the same price point as last year’s 40-in. models; some of that is just natural price erosion, he acknowledges. But consumers are also eager to replace 32-in. TVs with significantly bigger models — and that’s particularly good news for panel makers who sell by the square meter.

— The power of Walmart compels them! Even in the face of a labor dispute, Walmart heavily promoted its Black Friday deals and it seems to have paid off as waves of promotions kept shopper traffic spread out and lines flowing smoothly, Gagnon writes. "It seemed Walmart was more effective at pulling shoppers looking for TVs this Black Friday, reporting today that it sold more than 1.3 million televisions since 8PM on Thursday," he notes, showing a photo of shoppers "Starbucks and Smartphones in hand" at 5am lined up for a $299 Panasonic 50-in plasma TV. He also notes that Funai "moved a lot of boxes during Black Friday" — the firm climbed to #1 in LCD TV shipments in 3Q12 and nearly 20% share, with many of those units destined for Walmart’s Black Friday push, with whom it has partnered for years, he notes.

November 27, 2012 – LEDs have struggled to gain a foothold in the marketplace for indoor lighting applications, but technology improvements and supportive legislation are gathering momentum to help push LED adoption for residential buildings — the largest lighting application sector.

Global sales of LEDs for lighting applications totaled $3.57B in 2011, and should surge to $23.24B by 2018, calculates Frost & Sullivan. Behind that swell is "legislation that will essentially phase out incandescent lighting and other inefficient lighting technologies," as well as declining prices for LEDs that will boost demand and penetration of LED technology across multiple lighting applications, explains Frost & Sullivan industry analyst Hammam Ahmed.

The European Union has been an early adopter of legislation supporting a shift away from both manufacturing and sales of incandescent lighting; this legislation, though coming in multiple phases, has been echoed with similar policies sprouting up and implemented in various other countries (US, Switzerland, Canada, Australia). In Asia, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea are adopting LED-supportive legislation including financial incentives for both consumers and manufacturers.

Total global LED lighting market (2011), percent LED revenue by region (left)
and application (right). All figures are rounded. (Source: Frost & Sullivan)

Key factors limiting LED penetration into general lighting applications are pricing and technology improvements, but sharp and continued price declines should speed up the tipping point of price parity with other lighting technologies by the end of this decade, Frost & Sullivan says.

On the other side of that coin, manufacturers continue to improve lumens/dollar by pushing R&D and improvements in brightness, design, and quality of components, Hammam notes — though he admits "it remains to be seen how customers receive these new product developments." Additionally, those same relentless price declines are forcing manufacturers to come up with sustainable, long-term growth plans. "Participants from Eastern Asia, who have the ability to compete on prices, need to address quality issues to expand into the more developed markets of North America and Europe," he noted, while current market leaders "need to offer high-quality products and explore avenues for reducing cost of production."

November 26, 2012 – Despite lingering clouds obscuring near-term visibility for the semiconductor manufacturing industry, signs of macroeconomic life bode well for sales of electronics devices, and by association the chip technologies that power them.

Global GDP growth is expected to come in around 2.6% in 2012, very near the threshold of what defines a global recession and well below the long-term average of 3.5%, notes IC Insights. For 2013, though, global GDP is seen climbing to 3.2%, as there are signs of life in the US (stronger housing demand and hiring) and China (accelerating factory output and retail sales).

In step with the slower GDP, sales of electronic systems in 2012 are seen growing at just 3%, half their pace in 2011 and half their long-term average. Only communications (thanks to smartphones) will see decent growth this year, as it ascends to the top of the IC end-app food chain. But that same improving outlook for global GDP should pull electronic systems sales back up to 5% in 2013. Again, thank smartphones, whose shipments will surge 55% this year to 750 million units, and account for 49% of all cellphones in the year’s final (preholiday) quarter.

And stronger electronic systems sales bodes well for the components supplied within. IC Insights pegs the IC market growing 6% in 2013, and improving to a five-year CAGR of 7.4% for the period 2011-2016, which is more than double the 3.3% CAGR in the previous five-year period (2006-2011).

Worldwide electronic system producton by system type, in US $B. (Source: IC Insights)

November 23, 2012 – Growth in the industrial electronics semiconductor market is set to fall short of previous expectations in 2012 as the business is buffeted by weakening global economic conditions, with the LED market the sole bright spot, says IHS iSuppli in an updated report.

In general, revenue for industrial semiconductors — used in a wide array of application markets from home automation to aeronautics and military purposes — is projected to rise just 3% in 2012 to $31.4 billion — that’s less than half than the 7.7% growth forecast back in July. It’s also a meager expansion compared with 2011’s solid 9% increase and the exuberant 35% surge in 2010 immediately after the recession. For the next four years, revenue is set to rise in a range from 7-12% each year, reaching $44.8B by 2016.

Worldwide industrial electronics semiconductor revenue, in US $B. (Source: IHS iSuppli)

"Economic headwinds" started intensifying in 2Q12 and undercut chip revenue forecasts, affecting top semiconductor suppliers and OEMs of industrial electronics, explained Jacobo Carrasco-Heres, industrial electronics analyst at IHS. "And when hoped-for growth did not pan out as expected, and sales eventually came out lower, the market was downgraded to reflect the changed circumstances."

One segment that seems to have remained untouched this year is the robust LED market, thanks to the LED lighting boom that has taken hold in many parts of the world, noted Robbie Galoso, principal analyst for electronics at IHS. Philips enjoyed a 37% climb in LED sales in 2Q12 vs. a year-ago, and other LED lamp suppliers like Cree, LG Innotek, and Samsung LED also enjoyed solid 2Q results.

Industrial semiconductors are used in energy generation and distribution; military and civil aerospace; building and home control; medical electronics; manufacturing and process automation; and the test and measurement segment.

Many of the world’s 3D IC elite met last week at the 2nd annual Georgia Tech 2.5D Interposer Conference which focused on the technology and performance of silicon and glass interposers.

Matt Nowak of Qualcomm, long a 3D advocate, reported that Qualcomm has now built "thousands of parts" and does not see anything stopping high-volume manufacturing (HVM) except cost. Nowak indicates that Qualcomm will require a price of ~ $2 for a 200mm2 silicon interposer. The former is just out of the reach of those proposing "coarse" interposer fabrication, and the latter is significantly out of the pricing structure for dual damascene foundry-based fine interposers

Nagesh Vordharalli of Altera quoted an IMEC study which shows that the sweet spot for maximum bandwidth will come from interposers with RDL lines/spaces ~ 3

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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November 16, 2012 – The latest monthly numbers are in for semiconductor manufacturing equipment demand, and they’re not pretty: lows in both orders and sales not seen since the last major downcycle three years ago, and the short-term comparisons continue to widen.

North America-based manufacturers of semiconductor manufacturing equipment reported bookings (orders) of just $743.2M in October, down -18% from September and roughly -20% from a year ago. Billings (sales) came in at $986.5M, off by -15% M/M and nearly -22% Y/Y. (Both are three-month moving averages.) SEMI also revised downward its September data: Bookings lowered to $912.8M (they had been $952.9M), and billings down to $1164.4M (vs. $1177.4M). The book-to-bill (B:B) came in at an anemic 0.75, meaning that $75 worth of orders came in for every $100 shipped out. (A B:B above 1.0 would indicate a good sign of more business coming in; a number below 1.0 means the opposite, and a number substantially below 1.0 and sinking for a while, well…)

Here are some chilling metrics to illustrate just how sour the market for chip tools has become as we head to the finish line of 2012. (All data is compiled from SEMI’s historical tallies dating from Jan. 1991)

  • Bookings are at their lowest point since October 2009. Billings haven’t been this low since January 2010. Since peaking in May, equipment bookings have been slashed by half (-54%) and sales are off by more than a third (-36%).

  • For the ten months through October, equipment orders were tracking down -8.5% from the same period in 2011 to $12.6B, and sales were down -15.7% at $13.3B.

  • Bookings have declined by double-digits for five consecutive months (-11% to -18%), which hasn’t happened since the grand old days of December 2000-April 2001. Except for a single month of mathematically zero growth (April), bookings have declined Y/Y for 16 out of the past 17 months. (This might say more about the industry’s reliably brutal cyclicality than current malaise; May 2011 was the end of a 19-month period in the black, which was preceded by a 29-month trip through the doldrums.)

  • The B:B ratio has been in freefall since April when it was well above the parity level (1.12) — that’s six straight months of decline, which according to SEMI’s data hasn’t happened since late 2010. (We’ve had several five-month slides in the past two years.)

Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI, labeled the environment for semiconductor industry investments as "muted" entering the final quarter of 2012, though he stated that "investments in leading-edge technologies will continue to drive spending in the near-term." The outlook for 2013 will clear up shortly as chipmakers crystallize their 2013 capex plans, he added. (Note that with about six weeks remaining, any lack of clarity into 2013 planning doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.)

SEMI will present its updated consensus forecast in conjunction with SEMICON Japan on Tuesday Dec 4 (technically it’ll be 11am local time, which is the wee hours late Monday/early Tuesday morning here in the US). One can reasonably expect some drastically different numbers from its current official forecast, issued at SEMICON West in July, which predicted an overall -2.6% decline for the year in global frontend + backend equipment. Hopefully there will be some improved clarity in these coming weeks.