By Jeff Dorsch
There’s a lot of used semiconductor production equipment in the world, and when its original owners no longer need or want it, there are companies glad to take it off their hands.
There will 18 exhibitors in the secondary equipment field at SEMICON West this year. That’s “slightly more [exhibitors] than last year,” says Tom Salmon, SEMI’s vice president of global member services and standards, who heads up the organization’s Secondary Equipment & Services (SEA) special interest group. There will once again be a Secondary Equipment and Services TechZONE pavilion on the exhibit floor this year, in the South Hall of Moscone Center.
The SEA group has chapters in “nearly every SEMI region,” Salmon notes. The Americas chapter organized the “Productivity Innovation: Reducing Cost and Improving Performance at 200mm/300mm Wafer Fabs” session held Wednesday afternoon at the TechXPOT South booth, across the aisle from the SEA pavilion. Not all secondary equipment exhibitors will be in the SEA pavilion, but most will be.
The program summary for the TechXPOT session notes, “Many of today’s most productive 200mm and 300mm fabs are successful because they excel at rapid changeover and process flexibility, leverage the secondary equipment market for reduced cost and fast ramp-up, and deploy the latest advances and ideas in tool and materials productivity. This session will provide practical solutions and ideas to improve productivity at existing lines and fabs, including materials management, use and recovery, secondary equipment solutions, predictive tool maintenance and uptime strategies, energy efficiency, and other ideas for mature process lines and fabs.”
“North American fabs have been in operation for some time,” Salmon observes. He says the question for them is: “What methods can we use to maintain productivity in these fabs?” And cost is a key consideration in that evaluation, according to Salmon.
Secondary equipment companies specialize in “making legacy equipment more productive,” Salmon says. As a result, “the services part of the business will be significantly larger than the equipment part of the business,” he adds.
SEMI and Semico Research two years ago produced a study estimating that the secondary equipment market was worth $6 billion in 2010. More recent figures aren’t available, but the SEA group is developing a second edition of the study, Salmon reports.
If you’re using Twitter, look for the #SecondarySEMI hashtag in tweets.
There are reports that the used-equipment business has been in a prolonged downturn as the semiconductor industry has struggled to grow for the past two years, resulting in less investment in new production equipment and less wafer fab equipment turnover. Most of the leading integrated device manufacturers and silicon foundries are increasing their capital-expenditure budgets this year, however, which could create opportunity in secondary equipment and related services.
Abdi Hariri, the group vice president of global operations at Lam Research, heads up Lam’s Customer Support Business Group. Identifying trends in the secondary equipment market, he says, “We see a broad application of our tools in the secondary equipment market. There are of course the legacy technologies (>65nm, 150mm, 200mm tools), as well as some of the non-critical 300mm applications, but there are a couple of other market segments, such as MEMS, LED and OSAT, that are using tools that have been previously used for mainstream logic or memory processing.”
Asked about how Lam regards the secondary equipment market, which some vendors see as potentially detrimental to their service and spares business, Hariri says, “Many of our customers have fabs and equipment that are more than 10 years old. Some have both leading-edge and legacy fabs. We have a life cycle strategy in our company to support our customers in various stages of their fab and equipment life cycle. We like to see our equipment running at their most optimum design potential and as such we are very active in this market. We strongly believe that the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is uniquely suited to provide the required refurbishment knowledge and expertise as well as follow-on service and support that enables a fab buying used equipment to predictably deliver to the tight, production-ready timelines that our customers need.”
Software copyright issues are a perennially touchy subject in used equipment. Most OEMs insist on being paid for the software when equipment is sold to third parties. Lam’s Hariri says on this subject, “Our equipment is sold with a non-assignable, non-transferable software license to the original purchaser of the tool. The operating system is what enables the system to work, and we have an ongoing investment in maintenance, quality control and development of our software. We do require purchasers of our equipment to obtain a software license from us.”
Like other large vendors of wafer fabrication equipment, Lam does a tidy business in providing service and spare parts for its gear. As Hariri says, “There are many more legacy fabs in operation today than leading edge. Our customers expect us to support them during all aspects of their fab and product life cycle and we have various organizations and resources that support the needs of our customers. This is also a significant business that supports our investments during the industry down cycles.”