The Power and Allure of “Other”
09/01/2008
It is relatively easy to define the mainstream semiconductor market as simply silicon-based CMOS logic and memory. That’s the big market; that’s where the most advanced technologies come into play and that’s our core focus.
Increasingly, though, my attention shifts to what I’ll call “other”. You might call them niche markets or emerging technologies, but I’m talking about other industries that use thin-film deposition and fine-line lithography. My ever-growing list includes MEMS, photovoltaics, sensors, LEDs/lighting, micro-fluidics, displays, read-write heads, hard disk drives, thin-film batteries, RFID, high-power devices, discrete components, optoelectronics, photonics, bio-chips, MMICs, superconductors, data storage, and superconductors.
The list could go on to include rad-hard chips that go into outer space or electronics for pacemakers that must have 100% reliability. Even razor blades and diamonds could make the cut (pun intended) for these are applications also being investigated by some semiconductor equipment and materials suppliers.
I think there are several reasons why these “other” applications/technologies/industries are calling for attention. For one, they are growing rapidly. The semiconductor industry has matured, and we’ll be lucky to be see growth in the double digit range. By comparison, the thin-film PV industry is exploding at a 70% CAGR, according to some analysts. It’s an attractive proposition for equipment and materials suppliers to diversify and invest R&D dollars into these other areas.
Some of these other applications are also increasingly part of our everyday life. In the automotive world, the intelligent vehicle may soon include electronics for driver assistance, including adaptive cruise control, lane departure warning, blind spot detection and lane keeping systems. “It’s kind of a scary technology because we are going to take command and control of your car,” said Rob O’Reilly of Analog Devices, speaking at Semicon West. “The reliability of these products needs to be very, very good.”
In a presentation titled “MEMS Everywhere: From Lab to Fab to Worldwide Motion Sensation”, Reilly also pointed out 13 new “rock ???n scroll” motion-enabled solutions for handheld devices: menu navigation, pedometer, GPS-dead reckoning, gaming controls, answer/hangup call, power conservation, 3D object manipulation, screen/image rotation, gesture recognition, fall/drop detection, scrolling, tap detection and camera stabilization. “These are things that you could not do before or you didn’t do well or inexpensively. Now, with the introduction of some of these small MEMS devices, with less than 1 mm thickness, we’re really starting to enhance the experience within the handset,” he said.
These “other” applications are also interesting because they push us to make everything smaller and more integrated. But what to call it? The ITRS roadmappers made a valiant effort last year, coining the term “More than Moore” to describe this trend which goes beyond simple scaling. “Functions initially fulfilled by non-CMOS dedicated technologies may eventually be integrated onto a CMOS SoC, using mixed technologies derived from core CMOS,” notes the ITRS. “Consequently, the partitioning of system-level functions between and within SoC and SiP is likely to be dynamic over time.”
The International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) has traditionally lumped non-CMOS devices such as flexible displays into the “Emerging Technology” sessions, although last year there were sessions on “Solid State and Nanoelectronic Devices” and “Displays, Sensors and MEMS,”. The session on Emerging Technologies focused on energy harvesting electron devices. “With the evolution of MEMS and semiconductor technologies, it is now possible to integrate complete sense, compute, and communication functionalities into ever smaller size factors,” notes J. Rabaey of University of California, Berkeley in a paper titled “Energy Harvesting ??? A Systems Perspective.”
The best term might be functional diversification, according to Steve Hillenius, vice president of the Semiconductor Research Corp. (that’s what he told me over dinner in San Francisco anyway). He said it captures the idea of diversifying a product line. I’ll probably still think of it as “other”, but all I know is that everything is being integrated, semiconductors will be at the heart of it, and you’ll be reading more about it in Solid State Technology, and our sister pub Advanced Packaging. On that note, please join me in welcoming our new managing editor, Françoise von Trapp. She’ll be handling both SST and AP and probably lots of “other” things too. Aren’t we all?
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Pete Singer
Editor-in-Chief