SEMI annual dinner 1997
11/01/1997
Semi annual dinner 1997
Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International honored three industry notables for their outstanding contributions to semiconductor manufacturing technology at its 24th Annual SEMI Dinner and Award Ceremony (Fig 1).
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Figure 1. (l to r) Norman Goldsmith, senior program manager at Sarnoff Corp. - Process Technology award; Peter Rose, chairman of Krytek Corp. - Lifetime Achievement Award; Werner Kern, president of Werner Kern Associates - Process Technology award; Stan Myers, president of SEMI
. Peter Rose, chairman of Krytek Corp. received the Lifetime Achievement Award for the development of ion implant systems.
Norman Goldsmith and Werner Kern received the 1997 SEMI Award for Process Technology, including the RCA
wafer cleaning process. Goldsmith developed the boron nitride diffusion process.
Kern developed a silane/oxygen CVD
SiO2 process that eventually led to
boron/phosphorous silicate glass (BPSG).
At the dinner, Susan Billat presented an analyst`s perspective on the industry. She commented on the discrepancy between reports of persistent DRAM overcapacity and the recently strong book-to-bill numbers, saying that chipmakers are racing ahead of the technology roadmap in an attempt to make the capacity of competitors obsolete. In this era of strategic technology, she said, "The distinction between capacity buys and technology buys is vanishing. Even though nobody wants to build the first 300-mm fab, a corollary is that nobody wants to build the last 200-mm fab." Billat believes the industry will be flat this year (ahead of VLSI and Dataquest`s down projections), commenting that, "The US and Korea are ahead of roadmaps, while Europe is steady. Japan is waking up, but is still behind the technology power curve. Taiwan is absolutely on fire."
Laurent Bosson, corporate VP of manufacturing and chairman of the US organization for SGS Thomson Microelectronics, presented the keynote address from the chipmaker`s perspective. He said, "Market recovery is on the way, because this downturn was different from past ones." He stated that strong demand and moderate customer inventory levels will produce rapid growth as soon as the industries` simple overcapacity (mostly in DRAMs) is absorbed. He expects that in 2002, the world semiconductor market share will break down by region (Fig 2):
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Figure 2:Projected world semiconductor market share for 2002.
While the overall pie is certain to grow, both US and EU shares are expected to remain fairly constant. The big change is in Asia, where the rest of the region is expected to gain market share at Japan`s expense. Bosson explained that Japan has not made the necessary investments to keep its capacity up-to-date, "Japan`s facilities may be OK, but much of the equipment inside is nearly obsolete," he said. - E.K.