World News
01/01/2002
WORLDWIDE HIGHLIGHTS
Numbers rose across the board as the industry headed toward the end of 2001, with equipment orders, chip sales, and front-end capacity utilization all up for the month of October.
According to initial reports from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (Semi), the North American semiconductor equipment book-to-bill ratio rose in October to 0.71, with orders increasing by 5% and shipments dropping by 5%. That marked the third straight month that the b-to-b increased. Orders climbed to $651.1 million, up from a revised September figure of $619.2 million, and shipments were at $916.2 million, down from a revised September figure of $967.4 million.
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On the chip side of things, worldwide semiconductor sales rose to $10.43 billion in October, a sequential increase of 2.5% from the $10.18 billion logged in September, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), San Jose, CA. October marked the fourth consecutive month that the month-to-month sales improved. While the size of monthly decreases in sales had diminished for three months, October was the first month since November 2000 that saw positive sequential growth.
Lastly, VLSI Research, San Jose, CA, reported that worldwide front-end capacity utilization also rose for September, climbing to 79.4% from September's 75.2%. Additionally, VLSI reported that the worldwide IC book-to-bill ratio rose to 1.01 in October, a slight increase from September.
USA
Electroglas Inc., San Jose, CA, has formed a new software division, EG Soft. EG Soft incorporates the development and support organizations of Electroglas' existing software groups, including its sort floor automation group and subsidiaries Knight's Technology and Statware. The EG Soft organization consists of some 120 people, including product developers, applications engineers, and sales and support staff.
Motorola Inc., Shaumburg, IL, plans to commercialize its compound semiconductor-on-silicon technology by creating Thoughtbeam Inc., a focused business unit and wholly owned subsidiary. Thoughtbeam launches operations with a management team led by Padmasree Warrior, a corporate VP of Motorola, as the general manager.
Warrior was previously CTO and director of the 1100-member central R&D organization for Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. The company also has signed its first licensing agreement for production of gallium arsenide-on-silicon wafers with IQE Plc., a dedicated manufacturer of outsourced epitaxial wafers and services headquartered in St. Mellons, Cardiff, UK. IQE anticipates it can begin supplying evaluation wafers in 1H02.
CVD Equipment Corp., Ronkonkoma, NY, has entered into a contract to lease and buy a 50,000 ft2 facility on four acres in Ronkonkoma. The facility will eventually replace the company's current 20,000 ft2 rented facility and provide room for expansion as well. The purchase of the new facility is subject to financing and is expected to close in March.
Manufacturer of precision robotic transport systems Genmark Automation Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, has been issued US patent no. 6,297,611 for a robot that has independent end-effector linkage motion. The robot combines range of motion, compact footprint, and wafer swapping ability, according to Genmark.
Vishay Intertechnology Inc., Malvern, PA, has completed the acquisition of General Semiconductor Inc. Vishay's acquisition of General Semi includes its complete range of rectifiers, transient voltage suppressors, small-signal transistors, diodes, MOSFETs, and analog integrated circuits.
Air Liquide America Corp., Houston, TX, has purchased two nitrous oxide production facilities, one in Richmond, CA, and the other in Donora, PA. The capacity of the new plants will allow Air Liquide to ship nitrous oxide throughout North America.
Cadence Design Systems, San Jose, CA, has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Silicon Perspective Corp., a design technology firm in Santa Clara, CA. The financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed. Cadence expected the acquisition to be completed in December.
Uniroyal Technology Corp., Sarasota, FL, has completed the sale of its specialty adhesives segment, with total proceeds of some $21.6 million. Cash realized at closing was some $14.6 million, excluding transactional costs.
Simplex Solutions Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, has been awarded two US patents for its methods of modeling noise in IC substrates. The technologies defined in these patents are integrated within Simplex's SubstrateStorm substrate noise analysis tool.
The Dow Chemical Co., Midland, MI, and Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), Cambridge, UK, have reached an agreement licensing CDT's polyfluorene light-emitting polymer technology to Dow. The agreement, which is only for material IP, provides Dow with access to CDT's IP to polyfluorene-based LEPs and establishes guidelines for future development between the companies.
The Canadian federal and Alberta provincial governments have signed an agreement to invest $120 million in the first Canadian research facility for nanotechnology, to be located at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. Construction is expected to begin in the fall of 2002, and work will start immediately in temporary facilities. The federal and Alberta governments will each provide $60 million over five years. The institute will employ 150 people from the National Research Council, 50 from various universities, and up to 250 graduate students in research.
EUROPE
Aixtron, Aachen, Germany, has secured funding from the European Union for a project to develop a production tool for ferroelectric devices on 300mm wafers. The amount of funding was not released. Within this project, an existing process module already installed and hooked to a cluster platform will be retrofitted for depositions of optimized ferroelectric materials and processes using HeteroWafer Technology, ready for implementation into memory production lines. The processes under investigation are based on MOCVD, providing high uniformity and conformability. Memories based on the ferroelectric effect may replace many different memory types used today.
Tower Semiconductor Ltd., Migdal Haemek, Israel, and provider of physical foundation IP libraries Avant! Corp., Fremont, CA, have signed an agreement under which Avant! will develop, support, and distribute library products for Tower's 0.18µm process. According to the companies, device fabrication will be in Tower's new Fab 2.
Chartered Semiconductor Europe, which is a subsidiary of Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, Singapore, has opened an office in Stockholm, Sweden, to cover the Nordic market area. Stefan Ahlquist has been named director of Northern Europe and will head the UK, Benelux, and Nordic area. Prior to joining Chartered, Ahlquist was with Motorola.
JAPAN
Dainippon Screen Mfg. Co. and Kobe Steel Ltd. will jointly develop a next-generation semiconductor production chip cleaning and drying machine capable of making a chip with a circuit linewidth of 70nm. The companies started conducting joint research in 2000 and have established a basic chip cleaning and drying technology. Plans are, according to published reports, to produce and install a prototype at Kobe Steel's Takasago plant by the end of April 2002, and to market a product in 2003. They hope the machine will post annual sales of about x60 billion in 2004.
Japan's research consortium Selete plans to start its Asuka project research at corporate labs, instead of waiting for the new government cleanroom in Tsukuba to be finished next spring. Besides Selete's Yokohama site, which already had its 300mm tools installed, the consortium has now also installed 300mm tools in rented space in NEC's lab in Tsukuba to work on transistor gate dielectric materials. Selete now also plans to develop its next generation photomasks at Toppan Printing's lab in Saitama. Presumably Selete will still move its work from Yokohama to Tsukuba as planned next spring, and eventually the processes will all be integrated at the new Tsukuba cleanroom. Equipping the three labs will cost $230 million (x28 billion).
Tokyo Electron Ltd., Tokyo, Japan, plans to establish a new company in Shanghai to improve its customer support system for its semiconductor production equipment. The new company will commence operations in April and will be called Tokyo Electron (Shanghai) Ltd.
Infineon Technologies, Munich, Germany, and Sony Corp., Tokyo, Japan, will jointly develop secure ICs for contactless chip card systems. The companies expect that the ICs will be available by the end of this year. They will be integrated as dual interface chips, which have both contact and contactless interfaces.
Silicon Integrated Systems Corp. (SIS), Taiwan, has signed a cooperation agreement with Toshiba, Tokyo, Japan, in which SIS is authorized to use Toshiba's metal-oxide-semiconductor CMOS technology and related supporting technologies. SIS was aiming to deliver 900,000 Pentium 4-compatible chipsets in 4Q01.
 Japan tool orders rose by 35.6% in September. |
ASIA PACIFIC
Intel Corp., Santa Clara, CA, plans to invest $25 million to set up a new technology development center in Bangalore, India. Intel currently employs 500 engineers in six locations at Bangalore, and plans to consolidate the majority of its activities in the new building. Staff at the Bangalore center work on applications and technologies for e-business and develop software and hardware for networking and communications.
ChipPAC, Fremont, CA, has been selected by the Chinese government for a premier import classification, the company said. This classification enables ChipPAC to cut one to two days from traditional inbound customs clearance times. The process is designed to take two to four hours upon touchdown to deliver to ChipPAC's facility, as opposed to the usual processing upon arrival.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Hsinchu, Taiwan, said its board of directors has approved an additional T$7.86 billion outlay to expand the capacity of its Fab 12 to 12,000 300mm wafers/month from the current 10,000. The board has also authorized the chairman to raise up to T$15 billion via an issue of corporate bonds to accommodate capacity expansion, and other future long-term investments.