Secondary Equipment Market’s Secret Life
Analysis: Why the used equipment market has suddenly become so robust and why everyone needs to understand power and the importance of stacked die.
For almost as long as anyone in semiconductor manufacturing can remember, the used equipment market has always been associated with second-tier chipmakers and fabs. They lived in the backdrop, away from the perpetual battle to stay out in front of Moore’s Law, where the only differentiator was the price of hardware.
Out of the gate, the equipment was depreciated, but the processes were generally well defined because they had been in use for at least several years and the markets well understood.
Four significant shifts are altering that perception:
1. Power. At almost every process node, there are now low power and super low power processes being created. That has added new life into processes all the way back to 180nm, and in some cases even beyond. For many applications, if there is sufficient cost savings at older nodes with a concurrent increase in energy efficiency, then the chips being produced using older processes can be competitive in many cases.
2. Not everything scales. Analog developers have been complaining about migrating their technology to the most advanced nodes for years, which is one of the big attractions of stacked die. The most advanced nodes for analog are actually 40nm, while the largest volume of analog is somewhere between 90nm and 130nm. New equipment is not required for these technology nodes.
3. Costs for leading-edge fabs are exorbitant. The other piece of the equation is the sheer volume needed for foundries to stay on the leading edge. With the most advanced fabs now costing up to $5 billion, very few companies can afford to keep up. Even most of the IDMs now utilize a foundry model for the same reason.
4. New markets do not necessarily require new equipment. MEMS, photovoltaic and LEDs, in particular, are hot and growing markets that do not rely on the most advanced equipment. In fact, much of the manufacturing is done at older nodes using smaller wafer sizes.
“The secondary equipment market is a key contributor to the success of manufacturing,” said Karen Savala, president of SEMI Americas. “There are a lot of 200mm and 300mm fabs that rely on secondary equipment sourcing. This has been a way for some of the key equipment suppliers to come back to SEMICON.”