Category Archives: Semiconductors

IQE plc announces the launch of gallium nitride-based, high electron mobility transistor (GaN HEMT) epitaxial wafers on 150mm diameter semi-insulating silicon carbide (SiC) substrates, supplied by the WBG Materials subsidiary of II‐VI Inc. a global provider of engineering materials and optoelectronic components.

GaN power amplifiers offer superior power capability, efficiency, bandwidth and linearity compared with silicon (Si) or gallium arsenide (GaAs)-based technologies commonly used, providing significant benefits in terms of both higher performance and lower overall system costs.

GaN-based low-noise amplifiers exhibit improved robustness, noise figure and dynamic range when compared to incumbent solutions. In addition, GaN-based transistors can operate at high temperatures, thus reducing system cost, size and weight. As a result, GaN transistors are now established as a leading new technology for a wide range of defense applications.

Introduction of 150mm GaN HEMT epi wafer products also enables cost reduction, production capacity and yield improvement, as well as potential for insertion into a wider range of chip fabrication facilities. To date, commercial market penetration of GaN HEMTs has been limited by the higher cost of epitaxial material grown on 100mm SiC substrates.

IQE said it’s customers have demonstrated GaN HEMT fabrication using LDMOS (laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor) process lines, so the Group’s 150mm products are compatible with existing LDMOS processing lines that have been made available as a result of the silicon industry’s transition to 200mm technology.

 “Scaling up to 150mm wafer diameter is a critical milestone on the path to technological maturity and wide market acceptance of GaN HEMTs on SiC,” Russ Wagner, VP of IQE Wireless Business Unit said. “IQE has established an industry-leading position by offering a full range of GaN-based high-power RF transistor wafers in formats that enable the most cost-effective processing and system designs.”

 “The WBG Materials subsidiary of II-VI Inc. has developed high quality 4H – 150mm SiC substrates, for both the RF and power markets,” said Dr. Tom Anderson, General Manager of II-VI Inc. subsidiary WBG Materials. “These 150mm SiC substrates will greatly reduce device costs by increasing the number of devices produced per wafer, enabling 150mm wafers to be processed using modern, high volume semiconductor tools designed for large wafers and by providing competitive sourcing and leveraging of high volumes into commercial markets.”

Researchers from IMDEA-Nanociencia Institute and from Autonoma and Complutense Universities of Madrid (Spain) have managed to give graphene magnetic properties. The breakthrough, published in the journal ‘Nature Physics’, opens the door to the development of graphene-based spintronic devices, that is, devices based on the spin or rotation of the electron, and could transform the electronics industry.

Scientists were already aware that graphene, an incredible material formed of a mesh of hexagonal carbon atoms, has extraordinary conductivity, mechanical and optical properties. Now it is possible to give it yet one more property: magnetism, implying a breakthrough in electronics.

magnetizing graphene
This is a computerised simulation of TCNQ molecules on graphene layer, where they acquire a magnetic order.

This is revealed in the study that the Madrid Institute for Advanced Studies in Nanoscience (IMDEA-Nanociencia) and Autonoma Autonomous (UAM) and Complutense (UCM) universities of Madrid have just published in the ‘Nature Physics’ journal. Researchers have managed to create a hybrid surface from this material that behaves as a magnet.      

"In spite of the huge efforts to date of scientists all over the world, it has not been possible to add the magnetic properties required to develop graphene-based spintronics. However these results pave the way to this possibility," said Prof. Rodolfo Miranda, director of IMDEA-Nanociencia.

Spintronics is based on the charge of the electron, as in traditional electronics, but also on its spin, which determines its magnetic moment. A material is magnetic when most of its electrons have the same spin.

As the spin can have two values, its use adds two more states to traditional electronics. Thus, both data processing speed and quantity of data to be stored on electronic devices can be increased, with applications in fields such as telecommunications, computing, energy and biomedicine.

In order to develop a graphene-based spintronic device, the challenge was to ‘magnetize’ the material, and researchers from Madrid have found the way through the quantum and nanoscience world.

The technique involves growing an ultra-perfect graphene film over a ruthenium single crystal inside an ultra high vacuum chamber whereorganic molecules of tetracyano-p-quinodimethane (TCNQ) are evaporated on the grapheme surface. TCNQ is a molecule that acts as a semiconductor at very low temperatures in certain compounds.

On observing results through a scanning tunneling microscope (STM), scientists were surprised: organic molecules had organised themselves and were regularly distributed all over the surface, interacting electronically with the graphene-ruthenium substrate.                                                    

"We have proved in experiments how the structure of the TCNQ molecules over graphene acquires long-range magnetic order with electrons positioned in different bands according to their spin," clarifies Prof. Amadeo L. Vázquez de Parga.

Meanwhile, his colleague Prof. Fernando Martin has conducted modelling studies that have shown that, although graphene does not interact directly with the TCNQ, it does permit a highly efficient charge transfer between the substrate and the TCNQ molecules and allows the molecules to develop long range magnetic order.

The result is a new graphene-based magnetized layer, which paves the way towards the creation of devices based on what was already considered as the material of the future, but which now may also have magnetic properties.

Quantum dots are tiny nanocrystals with extraordinary optical and electrical properties with possible uses in dye production, bioimaging, and solar energy production. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have developed a way to introduce precisely four copper ions into each and every quantum dot.

The introduction of these "guest" ions, called doping, opens up possibilities for fine-tuning the optical properties of the quantum dots and producing spectacular colors.

"When the crystallinity is perfect, the quantum dots do something that no one expected–they become very emissive and end up being the world’s best dye," says Preston Snee, assistant professor of chemistry at UIC and principal investigator on the study.

The results are reported in the journal ACS Nano, available online in advance of print publication. Incorporating guest ions into the crystal lattice can be very challenging, says UIC graduate student Ali Jawaid, first author of the paper.

Controlling the number of ions in each quantum dot is tricky. Merely targeting an average number of guest ions will not produce quantum dots with optimal electrical and optical properties.

Jawaid developed a procedure that reliably produces perfect quantum dots, each doped with exactly four copper ions. Snee believes the method will enable them to substitute other guest ions with the same consistent results.

"This opens up the opportunity to study a wide array of doped quantum dot systems," he said.

Donald Wink and Leah Page of UIC and Soma Chattopadhyay of Argonne National Laboratory also contributed to the study.

Support for the research came from UIC and the UIC Chancellor’s Discovery Fund and the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund. The Materials Research Collaborative Access Team, a consortium for building and operating x-ray beamlines at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source, is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the MRCAT member institutions. The use of the Advanced Photon Source was supported by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences under contract DE-QC02-06CH11357.

UIC ranks among the nation’s leading research universities and is Chicago’s largest university with 27,500 students, 12,000 faculty and staff, 15 colleges and the state’s major public medical center. A hallmark of the campus is the Great Cities Commitment, through which UIC faculty, students and staff engage with community, corporate, foundation and government partners in hundreds of programs to improve the quality of life in metropolitan areas around the world.

Spectra-Physics, a Newport Corporation brand, introduces Spirit ps 1040-10, an industrial-grade picosecond laser for precision micromachining applications. The new laser delivers high finesse with exceptional beam quality (M2< 1.2), high stability (<1% rms over 100 hours), and short pulse widths (13 ps). The laser is also highly flexible with user-adjustable repetition rates from single shot to 1 MHz and an integrated pulse picker for fast pulse selection and power control. With >10 W average power, the laser is ideal for precision picosecond micromachining applications such as semiconductor and LED manufacturing, flat panel display processing, thin film ablation, and nano structuring.

“The Spirit ps laser’s precise beam shape, pulse duration, and energy translate into high-precision application results,” says Herman Chui, senior director of product marketing for Spectra-Physics. “Combined with its flexibility in repetition rate and pulse energy, this rugged industrial laser is ideal for a wide range of critical picosecond micromachining applications.”

Spectra-Physics’ Spirit ps 1040-10 laser is based on the field-proven Spirit industrial ultrafast laser platform. With high quantities of deployed systems in demanding 24/7 applications, this rugged product platform has consistently demonstrated high reliability.

The new Spirit ps 1040-10 laser will be featured at LASER World of Photonics in Munich, Germany, May 13-16, 2013.

Newport Corporation is a global supplier of advanced-technology products and systems to customers in the scientific research, microelectronics manufacturing, aerospace and defense/security, life and health sciences and precision industrial manufacturing markets. 

Spirit picosecond industrial laser

While investments and capital spending in Asia-Pacific garner much of the attention regarding semiconductor manufacturing, spending on equipment and materials in North America has totaled more than $100 billion over the past decade as leading device manufacturers expand capacity and invest in new facilities.  Another $25 billion in equipment and materials spending is forecasted to be spent over this year and next in North America, representing roughly 15 percent of the total spending globally in these two important industry segments. 

Semiconductor industry - investments

Intel, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung have been and continue to be the drivers of investments in North America. IBM and Micron invest in upgrades for leading-edge technology, while Cree and Philips Lumileds invest in LED and related production contribute to spending as well.  The NanoFab Xtension (NFX) facility by the College of Nanoscale Science & Engineering at SUNY Albany represents another major spending project in North America.

Fab investments represent a majority of the equipment spending in North America, though this region remains an important region for spending on test equipment.  Over $1.6 billion has been spent on test equipment in North America in the previous three years, and it is estimated that about another $500 million will be spent this year and in 2014.  SOC/Logic testers were the largest test equipment segment in North America with $356 million in spending in 2011 and $292 million in 2012.  In addition to the test equipment, VLSI Rearch estimates that 2013 test consumables (probe cards, sockets, device interface boards) market for North America is about $530 million.  More information will be available at the upcoming SEMICON West 2013 on July 9-11 in San Francisco. 

Over 50 hours of technical programs and 560+ exhibitors will be available at SEMICON West 2013 to provide the best answers to your questions about 450mm, EUV, 3D-IC, emerging technologies, roadmaps, and more. For information on SEMICON West 2013 (July 9-11), please visit www.semiconwest.org.  Free registration for SEMICON West 2013 ends May 10. Registration includes free access to all TechXPOT sessions, keynotes and executive panels.

The SEMI Industry Research and Statistics group provides market and trend information for market research, competitive analysis, and sales forecasting.

The eight leading suppliers of industrial electronics suffered revenue declines in 2012, reflecting weak conditions for the beleaguered market, according to an IHS iSuppli Industrial Electronics Market Tracker Report from information and analytics provider IHS.

The eight, along with two gainers in the Top 10, together accounted for revenue amounting to $12.19 billion, or 40.4 percent of the overall industrial electronics semiconductor space valued at $30.15 billion. The field was led by Texas Instruments, which managed to stay on top despite deteriorated revenue.

And just like TI, every other supplier occupying the second to the eighth spots in the Top 10 were similarly afflicted, suffering revenue reversals for the year, as shown in the attached table. Only two entities within the circle enjoyed revenue increases, as the markets they supplied were growth areas within the broader industry.

“The industrial electronics semiconductor industry as a whole contracted 5.4 percent in 2012 following a slowdown in worldwide markets where the chips are used, such as in security, test and measurement, motor drives, metering, medical electronics and renewable energies,” said Jacobo Carrasco-Heres, analyst for industrial electronics at IHS. “The anemic performance of these segments, in turn, dragged down the suppliers making the chips, resulting in 2012 revenue losses among the Top 8 that ranged from 0.7 percent to 20.4 percent.”

Texas Instruments remained at the pinnacle with $2.09 billion in revenue, even though it was down 6.6 percent for the year. TI did well in medical electronics and in the building and home control market, but was negatively affected by poor demand for motor drives and automation equipment. A bad year for wind and solar energy also pummeled TI in the energy distribution and generation segment.

French-Italian maker STMicroelectronics returned to the No. 2 spot last year after losing to Germany’s Infineon in 2011, which fell to third place again. STMicroelectronics had revenue of $1.47 billion, down 11.6 percent; compared to Infineon’s $1.46 billion, down a much larger 19.3 percent. Both companies saw their revenue retreat on various fronts, but each one saw growth in the lighting segment of the building and home control market.

In fourth place was Intel with $1.34 billion, followed at No. 5 by Analog Devices with $1.23 billion.

Both suffered reversals in the 7 to 8 percent range for the year.

The occupants of the sixth and seventh spots encountered the largest revenue fall within the group.

No. 7 Mitsubishi of Japan went down 20.4 percent to $944 million, while No. 6 Renesas Electronics of Japan did only slightly better with a 19.9 percent decrease to $1.15 billion. Contractions in the motor drive segment shrank the revenue of the two companies in the manufacturing and process automation market.

The final entity in the Top 10 not to post growth last year was No. 8 Maxim Integrated Products, flat at $865 million.

The two gainers in the Top 10 were Nichia and Panasonic, both from Japan. Nichia flew into the charmed circle all the way from No. 16, thanks to its involvement in light-emitting diodes (LED) for general lighting. Nichia’s revenue reached $822 million, up a mighty 24.4 percent. For its part, Panasonic came in after spending 2011 at No. 11, with growth last year of 9.8 percent to $821 million, on the back of high-performance segments such as security cameras and medical applications.

Among those that fell out of the Top 10 last year were NXP Semiconductors of the Netherlands, down from No. 9 in 2011; and Xilinx of the United States, down from No. 10.

In the world of optical defect inspection, finding on defect on a 300mm wafer can be like trying to find a single coin on the island of Taiwan. Now imagine being able to find that coin in just an hour, along with any other coins that look exactly like it. That’s exactly what NanoPoint will allow manufacturers to do.

KLA-Tencor’s NanoPoint is a new family of patented technologies for its 2900 series defect inspection system.

“[NanoPoint is] a new algorithm,” said Satya Kurada, product marketing manager at KLA-Tencor. “We now have the ability to generate care areas significantly smaller to inspect smaller areas, and remove noise from the pattern of interest. This will focus inspection resources on critical patterns.”

KLA-Tencor believes that NanoPoint represents an entirely new way to discover and monitor defects, at optical speed and on existing optical defect inspection equipment. By automatically generating millions of very tiny care areas based on user-defined patterns of interest, NanoPoint focuses the resources of the optical inspection system on critical patterns, as identified either by circuit designers or by known defect sites. During chip development, NanoPoint can reveal the need for mask re-design within hours, potentially accelerating the identification and resolution of design issues from months to days. During volume production, NanoPoint can selectively track defectivity within critical patterns—allowing process monitoring with sensitivity and speed far beyond the industry’s experience to date.

“This is a huge shift in the strategy of what customers could potentially do,” said Kurada. “This technology basically has our customer off-loading the e-beam, because of the sensitivity of which they could with this.”

Traditional e-beam approaches have worked very well, said Kurada, but e-beam optical inspection runs into challenges with wafer processing.

“Because we’re packing so much more tightly, defects that used to be non-nuisance are becoming yield killers,” said Kurada. “Traditional methods are having trouble finding these now. NanoPoint’s evolution is based on canceling out the noise to find the defects. Now it is using pattern-based inspection.”

Pattern-based optical inspection can identify all the weak points, said Kurada, because it identifies patterned noise maps. This allows for not only a cleaner inspection of tinier areas, but a faster completion time as well. What used to seven days, Kurada says will now only take one hour.

“Our customers are highly motivated to continue to extend optical inline defect inspection beyond the 20nm node,” said Keith Wells, vice president and general manager of the Wafer Inspection (WIN) Division at KLA-Tencor. “They want the speed and baseline preservation that only optical inspection can provide—and our challenge is to design equipment that can discover defects whose size is further and further below the inspection wavelength. In the past, we have offered various improvements to the light source, optics and other subsystems, but NanoPoint addresses the issue from a new angle. Based on customer feedback, I believe that NanoPoint is a breakthrough technology with the potential for applicability across a broad range of layers and process modules.”

Worldwide silicon wafer area shipments decreased during the first quarter 2013 when compared to fourth quarter 2012 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 2,128 million square inches during the most recent quarter, a 1.6 percent decrease from the 2,162 million square inches shipped during the previous quarter. New quarterly total area shipments are 4.8 percent higher than first quarter 2012 shipments.

"Total silicon shipment volumes experienced typical first quarter weakness, although volumes are up relative to the same quarter last year” said Byungseop (Brad) Hong, chairman of SEMI SMG and director of Global Marketing at LG Siltron. “Given current expectations for modest growth for the semiconductor industry this year, we are hopeful that the silicon industry will follow suit.”

Quarterly Silicon Area Shipment Trends

Semiconductor Silicon Shipments* – Millions of Square Inches

    Q1 2012    Q4 2012    Q1 2013 
  Total   2,033 2,162

2,128

*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 microelectronics manufacturing supply chains. SEMI’s 1,900 member companies are the engine of the future, enabling smarter, faster and more economical products that improve our lives. 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 pathway to creating low-resistance Ohmic contacts at nanoscale has been reported in Advanced Materials this week, a development which is of critical importance to the on-going advancement of oxide electronics.

The collaboration of researchers from the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN), the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and the University of California, Davis, has worked to determine the physical drivers required to facilitate formation of an “Ohmic contact,” which is highly desirable type of an electrical junction, between a metal and an oxide semiconductor.

When a metal and a semiconductor are joined, there are two possible types of contact that can result.  An “Ohmic contact,” in which electrical current can pass in either direction, and a “Schottky barrier,” in which case the current has preferential direction.

The type of contact depends on the combination of metal and semiconductor used but the vast majority of metals form Schottky barriers when deposited on oxide surfaces.  Not only do Ohmic contacts rarely occur, but also little is known at an atomistic level about what leads to a good Ohmic contact on a wide-gap oxide.

The study, which reports both experimental and theoretical results, suggests that an overlayer of Chromium metal deposited on the (001) surface of Niobium-doped strontium titanate (SrTi03), an oxide semiconductor of considerable interest in science and technology, forms a low-resistance Ohmic contact. It is revealed that in-diffusion of metal atoms into the first few atomic planes of the oxide is of critical importance to both anchoring the overlayer of Chromium for good adhesion and metalizing the oxide surface for very low contact resistance. These results provide a new strategy for generating Ohmic contacts in other metal/oxide interfaces as well as optimizing their characteristics.

Dr. Peter Sushko, one of the authors of the paper, commented “We think this effect of in-diffused metal atoms is generic and can manifest itself in many other interfacial phenomena.”

It is believed that the principle of near surface doping by incoming metal atoms will have a great impact in the overall field of oxide electronics and provides a new degree of freedom in materials design.

Starting late in 2011, the power electronics downturn in 2012 was quite severe, exhibiting -20 percent negative growth. The market suffered from the global economic downturn combined with external factors like China controlling what happened in some selected markets (Wind turbine or Rail traction projects that have been stopped or postponed).

However, the SiC device market kept on growing with a +38 percent increase year to year.

SiC technology is now commonly accepted as a reliable and pertinent alternative to the silicon world. Most power module and power inverter manufacturers have already included it in their roadmap as an option or as a firm project. However time-to-market differs from application to application as a function of value proposals for cost, specifications, availability and so on.

Despite a quite depressed market last year, PV inverters have proven their appetite for SiC devices in 2012. They are the biggest consumer of SiC devices together with PFCs. In 2011 and 2012, SiC diode business was the most buoyancy due to micro-inverter applications; however, Yole Développement is confident that both JFET and MOSFET will quickly catch-up and become dominant in revenue by 2016. SiC device (bare-dies or packaged discretes) market reached about $75M in 2012 with a sharp domination by Infineon and CREE again; however, the competition is little by little grabbing market share with STMicroelectronics and Rohm closing the loop.

30 contenders, half-a-dozen of new entrants, 1 dead

There are now more than 30 companies worldwide which have established a dedicated SiC device manufacturing capability with related commercial and promotion activities. Virtually, all other existing silicon-based power device makers are also more or less active in the SiC market but at different stages. 2012 has seen the ramp-up of some companies, such as Rohm, MicroSemi, GeneSiC or STMicro, facing the two giants CREE and Infineon, prefiguring a new market shaping in the coming years. Four new companies – Raytheon, Ascatron, IBS and Fraunhofer IISB – have decided, almost simultaneously, to launch SiC foundry services or contract manufacturing services. This business model establishment addresses the demand of future SiC fabless and design houses that may look for specific manufacturing partners. It will also probably act as a possible second source for IDMs in cases of production overshoot.

In Asia, Panasonic and Toshiba are now clearly identified as credible contenders, along with Mitsubishi Electric, now developing SiC power modules. Fuji Electric’s new SiC line is now running within the Japanese national program. No Chinese device maker has emerged yet; however, according to the huge investment plan in R&D, Yole Développement’s analyst suspects new IDMs will soon enter the business.

In the US, Global Power Device and USCi have now exited stealth mode and have strongly affirmed their intentions to take market share. Ultimately, the unexpected closing down of SemiSouth in October 2012 has created chatter about the quite stable-until-then SiC business. Several reasons have been disclosed that explain this decision (over-sized company, market too long to take-off); however, we can’t ignore that it discredits to some extent the Noff JFET technology. Only the future will tell.

Reshaping from discretes to modules

Yole Développement now sees the SiC industry reshaping, starting from a discrete device business and now mutating into a power module business. Originally, this was initiated by Powerex, MicroSemi, Vincotech or GeneSiC with hybrid Si/SiC products, then other players such as Mitsubishi, GPE and more recently Rohm have reached the market with full-SiC modules.

This trend will become dominant in the coming years as integrators require power modules in most of their mid and high power systems (generally starting from >3kW).

Yole Développement does forecast that SiC-based power module demand could exceed $100M by 2015 and top ~$800M in 2020 depending on whether or not the auto industry will adopt SiC.

Next critical challenges: Cost reduction, packaging & multi-sourcing

SiC equals high frequency and high temperature operation. That said, capturing these two added-values remains an issue as no existing set of technologies can fully answer that request now. The path to success for SiC large implementation will necessarily go through new packaging solutions. Numerous bottlenecks need to be unlocked: chip bonding, metallic contact technique, gel filling, encapsulant, EMI, to name a few.

Power device integrators generally rely on two, or even three sources to lower supply-chain risks. In SiC, it is now easy operating multi-sourcing for diodes, though not yet for transistors.

MOSFET, JFET or BJT must be available from at least two companies with similar specifications. This Yole Développement’s report also proposes a cost reduction roadmap for SiC device manufacturing at different levels of the process steps.