by Debra Vogler, Instant Insight Inc., Sunnyvale, CA

Speaking at the Tuesday morning SEMICON West TechXPOT South (“Enabling Sub-22nm with New Materials and Processes”), Carlos Mazuré, CTO, Soitec, told attendees of news he had just received from IBM.

Comparing FinFET performance data published at the June VLSI Symposia with fully-depleted SOI (aka ETSOI [extra-thin SOI]), IBM told Mazuré that its benchmark studies show that FDSOI runs much faster than the FinFET. IBM anticipates being able to publish its data at IEDM in December.

by Debra Vogler, Instant Insight Inc., Sunnyvale CA

Post-SEMICON West, KLA-Tencor’s Ali Salehpour, SVP/GM, expressed enthusiasm concerning the news of Intel’s investment in ASML to help implement EUVL on 450mm wafers. “This clearly underlines the industry’s collective intentions,” said Salehpour. “Availability of lithography tool sets is in the critical path for eventually building chips on 450mm wafers at the sub-20nm design nodes.” He also observed that the news coincides with SEMI’s industry research and statistics group’s prediction that by 2017, the industry will see the beginning of operations of at least three 450mm fabs. “This is in line with the published timelines of leading IC makers such as Intel and TSMC.”

Because the 450mm transition is expected to happen around the 14nm design node, the industry is facing twin challenges: smaller design rules on larger wafers, commented Salehpour. The industry is responding with increased R&D, including the 450mm research facility at imec. “Their [imec] cleanroom is expected to be operational by 2015,” said Salehpour. KLA-Tencor’s Surfscan SP3 450 unpatterned wafer inspection system will be installed in the facility.

Major Structural Changes in Store for the Industry

by Debra Vogler, Instant Insight Inc., Sunnyvale, CA

 The semiconductor industry has to move EUVL into volume production, develop new transistor architectures and new channel materials (as a minimum), and transition to 450mm – all within the next several years. While these activities are undertaken, industry consolidation will continue, and some companies may need to retool their business models. Bill McClean, president, IC Insights, noted that Intel, Samsung, and TSMC will probably be able to manage funding at the levels the companies believe to be necessary. Mid-range companies such as GlobalFoundries, Hynix, UMC, and Micron, however, will be challenged, and other companies may choose to go fab-lite (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Transition of logic production to IC foundries. SOURCE: IC Insights

Intel is able to spend over $20B total each year on R&D and capex combined, observed McClean. “That’s a huge amount of resources and research that can be called upon to make those big leaps,” said McClean. “And there isn’t anyone at this time that can stick with that type of investment.” Though AMD will feel the pinch if Intel’s process gets too far ahead, McClean noted that Intel’s impact on the rest of the industry will not be too great because they are not huge competitors in other areas such as NAND Flash, or DRAM, nor is the company the leading foundry. Therefore, until Intel’s major product is not a microprocessor, McClean believes that it’s alright for the rest of the industry to make progress and to invest at a different rate. “Intel is unique, and sometimes it’s a mistake to judge the rest of the industry by what Intel is doing,” said McClean.

Turning attention to another industry heavyweight, McClean observed that Samsung is playing out the vertically integrated business model to perfection. A key factor to ensuring success with the vertically integrated model is for the people at the top to be behind it. The top executives have to be willing to invest during industry downturns so that when the business cycle goes up again, the company will have the market share, the experience, and new fabs ready to go. Without such support from the top, the model falls apart completely, explained McClean.

Wafer size transitions will impact both digital and analog

Wafer size transitions are not the sole province of the top 10 or so IC manufacturers and foundries that are expected to be able to move to 450mm manufacturing. Analog may be a different world, but McClean noted that even those device manufacturers are getting pressured to move from 200mm wafers to 300mm. “Almost all analog chips are made on 200mm wafers,” said McClean. But TI forced the issue of going to 300mm when it purchased Qimonda’s 300mm tools for very little money when that DRAM fab went out of business. As more companies feel the pressure to make the move to the next wafer size, business models are challenged, forcing adjustments (the familiar chorus of going fab-lite, or maybe even going out of business).

When asked to comment on the alphabet soup of 450mm consortia and whether it might be better to pool resources, McClean said that participants and different regions have their own agendas. For example, unless Intel builds a 450mm fab in Ireland, European equipment and materials suppliers will have no other indigenous European IC manufacturer at 450mm. What these suppliers want to avoid is being shut out of leading-edge production. “If you look 10 years down the road, almost all leading-edge digital will be on 450mm wafers,” said McClean. “If you’re not a supplier to that, you’re out.”

And speaking of being out of business: McClean observed that there are about 70 companies doing 200mm production, 30 companies doing 300mm, and fewer than 10 expected to do 450mm. “If that isn’t a consolidation, I don’t know what is,” he said. “Major structural changes are coming, and we’re right in the midst of it.”

by Jeff Dorsch

If you want to see the industry’s progress in plastic electronics, just watch some television.

Image courtesy Samsung, 2012A highlight of the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show held in Las Vegas in January of this year was the introduction of organic light-emitting diode television sets by Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics. These 55-inch OLED TV sets will hit the market later this year, offering consumers a thinner, higher-resolution alternative to liquid crystal display-based TVs.

OLED technology is seeing wider implementation this year, in displays, lighting and organic electronics, according to NPD DisplaySearch. The market research firm estimates that OLED displays had sales of more than $4 billion in 2011 and forecasts that the market will exceed $20 billion by 2018. OLED lighting is forecast to generate $6 billion in annual sales by 2018.

“OLED displays operate through direct emission, as opposed to transmissive LCD or reflective displays, which enables area lighting,” said Jennifer Colegrove, Vice President of Emerging Display Technologies for NPD DisplaySearch. “The technology has made good progress and is ready to enter large-size applications, but low-cost manufacturing for large sizes is still a challenge.”

Market forecasts for OLEDs and other plastic electronics (also known as flexible electronics) vary widely, with some research reports putting compound annual growth rates for such products at 30 percent.

On the technical side, SEMICON West will feature two sessions on the technology: “FlexTech Alliance Presents: Metal Oxide TFT Devices and Technology” at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, July 11, and “Practical Plastic Electronics: Bringing Disruptive Flexible and Organic Materials into Volume Electronics Manufacturing” at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, July 12. In addition, this year will see the fourth annual celebration of “Plastic Electronics Day” at SEMICON West.

The Plastic Electronics Exhibition and Conference will be held concurrently with SEMICON Europa on October 9-11 in Dresden, Germany. SEMI acquired the conference in February of 2012 and has formed a special interest group devoted to plastic electronics.

Thomas Morrow, SEMI’s Executive Vice President of Emerging Markets and CMO is enthusiastic about the subject of plastic electronics, saying some market forecasts put the market growing to something between $45 billion and $100 billion by 2020. There has been “… a lot of speculative hyping over the years” about plastic or flexible electronics, he acknowledges.

One segment that is “clearly emerging” and “very promising” is OLED displays, Morrow says. That segment will drive $5 billion in capital expenditures this year by Samsung, LG and other display manufacturers. The growth in OLED display capital spending will be “significant for the next seven years,” he adds, increasing to $35 billion a year by 2020, a tantalizing opportunity for equipment suppliers.

OLED is “the driver of a lot of capital investment,” Morrow notes. “It’s a ‘killer app’ in flexible electronics.”

Samsung introduced the first LED TV in 2009, and active-matrix organic LEDs are the coming wave in television technology. The next few years will witness the “turnover of the television market from LCD to LED,” Morrow predicts. OLED TVs are thinner and lighter than LCD TVs, he says, and they consume less power than their LCD predecessors, as well.  “OLED has all these qualities,” Morrow says. “People clearly want the best resolution, picture performance, and picture quality,” which sums up the attributes of OLED TVs.

On a smaller scale than flat-screen TVs, dual high-brightness OLED backlights are behind the acclaimed Retina display on the latest iPad tablet computer. Those OLEDs are “responsible for the thinness” of the new Apple tablet, says Morrow. OLEDs also offer more energy efficiency than other display technology, and they have greater color clarity to boot, he adds.

In addition to displays for tablets and TVs, plastic electronics are making progress in batteries, logic and memory devices, and photovoltaic solar cells, according to Morrow. Applied Materials is doing “really exciting things in batteries,” he says. “Solid-state batteries have broad applications in consumer electronics and distributed-sensor networks. We’re at the vanguard of saying, ‘We can do this now.’ ” Energy harvesting and thin-film batteries are leading-edge developments in the energy area, Morrow adds.

Organic photovoltaics are “recognized as a promising technology,” Morrow states. Manufacturing such solar cells remains a challenge, however.  “Building a production system around is an overwhelming investment,” Morrow says. Organic PV is “still in the lab, primarily,” he adds.

The Holy Grail in plastic electronics is roll-to-roll manufacturing – essentially putting a flexible sheet of substrate material into a machine and having a roll of plastic electronic products come out of the other end. For now, roll-to-roll is “a leap for logic, memory and display manufacturing,” Morrow says. “Everybody’s been building their own equipment, solving their own problems with jerry-rigged platforms.” Making true roll-to-roll manufacturing a reality depends on “solving point problems,” such as coming up with fab-line tools for characterization, metrology and other steps, he notes.

One application where roll-to-roll manufacturing could prove feasible and useful in the near future is making touch-screen displays for the iPhone and other smartphones, added Morrow.

But what of the long-fabled “electronic newspaper,” a flexible display you could roll up and put in your pocket, which would be regularly refreshed with breaking-news content? “Exotic form factors are attractive and appealing,” Morrow admits, but the electronic newspaper may have become an obsolete concept with the advent of smartphones and tablets. These Internet-connected mobile devices access the latest news and other important information with a few clicks on a Web browser, diminishing the need for a new and different platform.

Although plastic electronics will be found in a number of areas, such as energy generation, optoelectronics, radio-frequency devices and sensors, it appears that OLEDs for displays and lighting are the big-growth segment for the near future. “OLEDs will be on a rapid penetration rate over the next five years,” Morrow predicts.

Among the SEMICON West exhibitors that are active in plastic and flexible electronics technology are AIXTRON, Molecular Imprints and Multek Flexible Circuits, according to Morrow.

One of the highest-profile companies in plastic electronics, Plastic Logic, has retrenched its operations this year. This company has given up plans to market an e-reader based on its technology, and has now become a technology licensing firm. The company was formed in 2000 to commercialize technology developed at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. Pilot production of its flexible displays began in 2003, followed by volume production in 2008. At the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show exhibition, Plastic Logic introduced the QUE proReader, its entry in the e-reader market. Unfortunately for the company, Apple brought out the first iPad tablet computer three weeks later. At release, the iPad included a library of e-books that could be read on the new and attractive slate. Plastic Logic killed the QUE proReader later that year.

In early 2011 the company received $280 million in venture capital from Rusnano and Oak Investment Partners, and it made plans to offer another e-reader, the Plastic Logic 100, to schools in Russia. That effort didn’t pan out, either, leading to the company closing its U.S. office in May and scaling back operations elsewhere.

Plastic electronics may have its own boom-and-bust stories to tell in the future. The market verdict on OLED TVs has yet to come, and much work remains in widening the use of flexible electronics. The common response in the industry to this challenge? “Bring it on!”

The 2012 “Best of West” award was presented to Jordan Valley Semiconductor UK Ltd. for their QC-TT defect inspection system at a ceremony on Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at the annual SEMICON West exhibition.

At a presentation ceremony in the Jordan Valley Semiconductor booth, Isaac Mazor, CEO of Jordan Valley Semiconductor, said, “One thing I’m really proud of is that it [the system] was developed in the U.K. It’s hitting significant needs for 300-millimeter and 450-millimeter [wafers].” Alon Kapel, the company’s director of sales and marketing, noted this is the second time in three years that Jordan Valley Semiconductor has won the “Best of West” award. He looks forward to claiming the prize again in 2013.

Jordan Valley Semiconductor UK Ltd. Receives “Best of West” Award for their QC-TT Defect Inspection System

The three finalists for the 2012 Best of West were:

The QC-TT defect inspection system from Jordan Valley Semiconductor UK Ltd. solves key issues in the use of 450mm wafers in a manufacturing environment, where wafers are subjected to more handling steps and the thermal stresses on larger wafers are much higher. This makes the wafers more prone to breakage, which can be predicted using the QC-TT. The system can also identify the slip and other crystalline defects in wafers, which may not have catastrophic effects on the substrate integrity but will contribute to a reduction in yield.

The NSR-S320F Dry ArF 193nm scanner from Nikon Precision, Inc. is based on the company’s Streamlign platform, to satisfy the demanding non-immersion overlay accuracy, stability, and ultra-high productivity requirements essential to cost-effective 22 nm applications and beyond. The Streamlign platform, which was first employed on immersion scanners, p rovides industry-leading overlay accuracy less than or equal to 3 nm with throughput greater than or equal to 200 wafers per hour (WPH).

X-Plane Analysis from Nordson DAGE, which is an option for the company’s DAGE range of X-ray inspection systems. It uses a tomosynthesis technique to create 2D X-ray slices in any plane of a semiconductor device or printed circuit board assembly. The user can get a very high level of detailed information about potential failures without the need to destroy the sample, usually necessary with traditional CT systems.

by Debra Vogler, Instant Insight Inc.

Mention EUV lithography (EUVL) at any industry event, and the likely comments will be about the status of source productivity improvements. Later this year, ASML will be shipping its production version EUV scanner, the NXE:3300B, which is expected to have a throughput of 125wph at 15mJ/cm². The source power is a bit of a moving target, as the company’s roadmap shows improvements throughout 2012 from about 20W, to 50W, and ultimately, somewhere in the 105-250W range to support a throughput of 60-125wph. EUV source suppliers Cymer and Gigaphoton are both working on a number of key productivity enhancements, with new data coming into play seemingly every few months.

According to Michael Lercel, senior director of EUV product marketing at Cymer, the company has been able to demonstrate 50W of open loop average power running pre-pulse for periods of time at high duty cycle on an internal HVM phase I source (Fig. 1). Lercel noted that with pre-pulsing and at a moderate duty cycle (not the full operating duty cycle used for the 50W source), the source can get up to 90W, which is a significant increase in conversion efficiency over what the ~10W sources are running in the field today.

Figure 1. LPP with pre-pulse: capability up to ~50W average power at high duty cycle demonstrated at Cymer on an internal HVM I source. SOURCE: Cymer, 2012 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference, paper #8322-53

Increasing the drive laser power to get to the 250W HVM source (i.e., HVM phase II) naturally involves design changes to the drive lasers, making them larger and more powerful by adding more stages of amplification, which Lercel says is a fairly well known technology. “The challenge is maintaining the optical quality as you keep increasing the power,” said Lercel. “You’re putting quite a bit of load on the optical components.” Still, he characterizes these as more engineering challenges rather than new physics challenges.

Two major changes that Cymer had to make to increase the source availability from 70% to 95+% involved the collector mirror and the droplet generator. The collector mirror had to be designed so that it can be removed and replaced much more quickly (without opening the vacuum chamber), and the collector mirror lifetime was extended by using improved coatings to enable it to run for about 8-10 weeks of operation in the field. The company cannot comment on improvements to the droplet generator except to say that the lifetime was increased by a factor of 8x.

Phil Alibrandi, director, sales and global account management at Gigaphoton USA, told SEMI that conversion efficiency is influenced by both the size of the initial tin droplet and the ability of the pre-pulse laser to properly target and expand the material into a uniform “mist.” “The drive laser’s pulse must hit the “mist,” create the plasma, and unleash 5% of the potential energy,” said Alibrandi.

At SEMICON West, Gigaphoton released news that it has been able to show a maximum of 5.17% conversion efficiency with an average of 4.7% (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. The plot shows the resulting EUV power at IF as the conversion efficiency (CE) and main laser power increase. By holding the CO₂ laser power constant, the data illustrates the leverage of 5% CE vs. any lesser value. SOURCE: Gigaphoton

According to Hakaru Mizoguchi, CTO of Gigaphoton, the company’s proprietary pre-pulse laser, which uses a shorter wavelength than the CO₂ main laser, is vital to achieving these results. “A shorter wavelength, pre-pulse laser creates the initial, uniform thermal expansion of the tin droplet with insignificant loss of potential energy,” said Mizoguchi. “Combined with the proper spot size of the main laser pulse, more energy is released from the plasma.” The company also said that it can reduce the size of the droplet to much less than the typical 30-35µm size. As a result, Mizoguchi explained that no tin fragments are created and superconducting magnets “sweep” away the remaining ionized material. “Significant amounts of debris never get close to the collector mirror,” he said.

Gigaphoton is also pursuing an “on-demand” tin droplet generator. This “on-demand” alternative to the current continuous stream droplet generator will use less tin material and eliminate any unused raw tin that could be propelled through the chamber.