Issue




07/01/2000








Haavind
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Remember that song with the great disco beat? They should be playing it at Semi West this year. From the bottom of the doldrums in 1997 and 1998, the semiconductor processing industry enters the new millennium with the most triumphant revival in its history. The first Semi West Show of this century will be the happiest industry get-together in years, with floods of up-beat business reports accompanying the "chunk-a-chunk" of working equipment, silvery sales pitches, and lively parties.

The Semi West Show emerged from gloom two years ago to wariness at last year's event. This year the feeling is euphoria. Vendors cannot keep up with the flood of orders. Even Wall Street's Doubting Thomases have begun to beat the drums not just for chipmakers, but also for their tool and materials suppliers. Semi rented the biggest hangar it could find at Moffett Field in Silicon Valley to have a monster celebration and break out the bubbly!

Who will be the biggest winners in the growing business bonanza? Those who best divined where the market was going and developed the new technology — and the features such as higher productivity, better process control, automation capabilities, and flexibility being sought by buyers in this frenetic marketplace—will fare best. Toolmakers and materials suppliers who used the downturn to intensify R&D on new processes and advanced tools are now reaping the rewards. While copper interconnects are only beginning to appear in high volume chips, the industry appears ready to make a big move toward copper in order to speed circuits. Watch for dramatic announcements of new technology and big orders around Moscone and its environs. Chemical-mechanical planarization (CMP) is critical for dual damascene processing, and those with solutions for selective polishing and minimizing dishing should find eager customers. New dielectric materials, both low-k (for logic and processors) and high-k (for memories), are moving quickly toward production, and users will be looking for the best choices among a strong field of contenders. Dielectric etch and processes for shallow-trench isolation (STI), will also be on many radar screens. Tools with built-in metrology, and metrology suitable for monitoring processing on the fly, will also be hot items.

Back-end processes for packaging and test, featured in the San Jose branch of the big show, will offer an even greater array of new options, with the rise of many forms of bump technology, ball grid arrays, flip-chips, chip-scale, and wafer level packaging.

You will find many significant new announcements in our Semicon West Product Panorama, starting on p. 295. Here are a few to check out:

  • The Coriolis force is harnessed for mass flow control of fluids at low flow rates in Brooks Instruments' new Quantim devices (p. 310).
  • Wafer temperature uniformity in plasma processes can be measured against many process and equipment variables using built-in fiber optic sensors in SensArray's APTOS 2 (p. 295).
  • Dispersive Raman spectrometry is totally automated in the Almega, from Nicolet, which offers multiple laser options (p. 302).
  • A quadrupole mass spectrometer, the CompactCVD from MKS Instruments, will perform in situ process control (p. 295).
  • Dielectric etch at rates of 5500Å/min with polymer control to stretch time between cleans for 0.13mm features and lower is offered by the eMax Centura from Applied Materials (p. 300).
  • A single integrated dry pump from BOC Edwards (IPX500) achieves low base pressures at up to 295 CFM, taking the place of a combination of a dry pump and a secondary turbo or cryo pump (p. 295).

These are only a few from a wide array of significant product advances being unveiled at this year's show.

Enjoy, everyone — it's CELEBRATION TIME!

Robert Haavind
Editor in Chief