Dan Armbrust, President and CEO, Sematech
Over the last half-century the semiconductor industry has been remarkably successful in making chips that are faster, better, cheaper — and smaller. As a result, our world is smaller — people around the globe are connected in ways we never even imagined a few decades ago.
The industry has been equally successful in creative cooperation, driven by both opportunity and necessity. The advantages of shared R&D models are clear: minimizing the cost of developing new technologies, sharing the risks, and making otherwise big and complex research projects possible.
In addition to alliances and partnerships, the industry also comes together in technology conferences, allowing manufacturers, suppliers, developers, academia and consortia to share knowledge and thus make the most informed, cost-effective decisions possible.
Every year SEMATECH and its subsidiaries sponsor, host and participate in various workshops and forums at SEMICON West. The highly anticipated event, attended by thousands of experts each year, provides knowledge-sharing, content-laden meetings, and serves as an important arena to foster dialogue and cooperative action.
At SEMICON West this year there will be exciting new developments that will further exemplify the innovative strides the industry is taking to accelerate technology development, increase productivity, and reduce costs.
The desire for integration of function and performance improvement is driving strong interest in 3D ICs with TSV interconnects. 3D interconnect is an expansive technology that requires broad collaboration among IDMs, equipment and materials suppliers, fabless and fab-lite manufacturers, and test, packaging and assembly companies. In order to address the various implementation scenarios for 3D TSV, leading-edge processes, integration approaches, and tool sets are being developed — including the development of wafer metrology technologies to measure and improve 3D interconnect processes.
Another important topic at SEMICON West will be the outlook on next-generation fab technologies, such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. This year, more than any other, we see the EUV community working collaboratively to address capital cost issues as well as find innovative solutions to the most prevalent challenges in advanced lithography technologies.
For example, SEMATECH’s EUVL Mask Infrastructure (EMI) partnership, an industry-wide consortium of EUV stakeholders to fund the development of metrology infrastructure to support EUV mask development, shows that we can go outside the customary business practices and collaborate — across the entire supply chain — on the development of next-generation lithography. With today’s industry structure, it is inevitable that other major technology transitions will have to be addressed across the supply chain in unaccustomed collaborations.
No other industry engenders this kind of collaboration or interdependence, and SEMATECH is proud to play a role. Innovation and connections — the keys to staying productive and profitable in a changing industry — will be the overarching theme this year at SEMICON West, a time-honored venue, in bringing people together, showcasing our industry’s innovation, and building bridges to the future.