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In its upcoming Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2018 (to be released at the end of July), IC Insights forecasts that the 2018 global electronic systems market will grow 5% to $1,622 billion while the worldwide semiconductor market is expected to surge by 14% this year to $509.1 billion, exceeding the $500.0 billion level for the first time.  If the 2018 forecasts come to fruition, the average semiconductor content in an electronic system will reach 31.4%, breaking the all-time record of 28.8% that was set in 2017 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Historically, the driving force behind the higher average annual growth rate of the semiconductor industry as compared to the electronic systems market is the increasing value or content of semiconductors used in electronic systems.  With global unit shipments of cellphones (-1%), automobiles (3%), and PCs (-1%) forecast to be weak in 2018, the disparity between the moderate growth in the electronic systems market and high growth of the semiconductor market is directly due to the increasing content of semiconductors in electronic systems.

While the trend of increasing semiconductor content has been evident for the past 30 years, the big jump in the average semiconductor content in electronic systems in 2018 is expected to be primarily due to the huge surge in DRAM and NAND flash ASPs and average electronic system sales growth this year. After slipping to 30.2% in 2020, the semiconductor content percentage is expected to climb to a new high of 31.5% in 2022.  IC Insights does not anticipate the percentage will fall below 30% any year through the forecast period.

The trend of increasingly higher semiconductor value in electronic systems has a limit.  Extrapolating an annual increase in the percent semiconductor figure indefinitely would, at some point in the future, result in the semiconductor content of an electronic system reaching 100%.  Whatever the ultimate ceiling is, once it is reached, the average annual growth for the semiconductor industry will closely track that of the electronic systems market (i.e., about 4%-5% per year).

Micron (Nasdaq:MU) and Intel today announced an update to their 3D XPoint™ joint development partnership, which has resulted in the development of an entirely new class of non-volatile memory with dramatically lower latency and exponentially greater endurance than NAND memory.

The companies have agreed to complete joint development for the second generation of 3D XPoint technology, which is expected to occur in the first half of 2019. Technology development beyond the second generation of 3D XPoint technology will be pursued independently by the two companies in order to optimize the technology for their respective product and business needs.

The two companies will continue to manufacture memory based on 3D XPoint technology at the Intel-Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) facility in Lehi, Utah.

“Micron has a strong track record of innovation with 40 years of world-leading expertise in memory technology development, and we will continue driving the next generations of 3D XPoint technology,” said Scott DeBoer, executive vice president of Technology Development at Micron. “We are excited about the products that we are developing based on this advanced technology which will allow our customers to take advantage of unique memory and storage capabilities. By developing 3D XPoint technology independently, Micron can better optimize the technology for our product roadmap while maximizing the benefits for our customers and shareholders.”

“Intel has developed a leadership position delivering a broad portfolio of Optane products across client and data center markets with strong support from our customers,” said Rob Crooke, senior vice president and general manager of Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group at Intel Corporation. “Intel Optane’s direct connection to the world’s most advanced computing platforms is achieving breakthrough results in IT and consumer applications. We intend to build on this momentum and extend our leadership with Optane, which combined with our high-density 3D NAND technology, offer the best solutions for today’s computing and storage needs.”

By Shannon Davis

Steve Jobs. Benjamin Franklin. Albert Einstein. Marie Curie. What do these world-changers all have in common? Where did their drive to innovate come from? Melissa Schilling, PhD, had to find out.

“Innovation and creativity has been a hot area of research for a long time, but we don’t tend to study outliers and in part that’s because there’s methodological challenges with that,” she explained to the audience during her keynote address on Tuesday at SEMICON West 2018.

Melissa Schilling, PhD, New York University

So, the New York University professor created a multiple case study research project to tackle these questions, which are addressed at length in her latest book, “Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World.” Her book invites us into the lives of eight world-famous game-changers — Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, and Steve Jobs – and identifies the common traits and experiences that drove them to make spectacular breakthroughs, again and again. Schilling believed that once we understand what makes someone a serial innovator; we can also understand the breakthrough innovation potential in all of us.

The first common trait Schilling identified in her research was a sense of separateness – a discovery that she found remarkable.

“I thought most people would be super connected with lots of diverse connections,” she said. “I was wrong about that. Every single person I studied, with the exception of Benjamin Franklin, had this…feeling of detachment.”

Einstein, said Schilling, even went so far as to say he didn’t need direct contact with individual humans, even his own family. Marie Curie and her husband eventually sent both of their daughters to be raised by their grandparents, so that they could devote more time to their research. Dean Kamen’s feelings of separateness helped to shield him when his peers didn’t believe it was possible to create a two-wheeled wheelchair (which we now know as the Segway).

What can we learn from this? “First thing we have to learn is that we need norms that permit people to be unorthodox,” said Schilling. “We need to be able to embrace weirdness.”

Schilling pushed back against the idea of brainstorming teams in the tech world, a practice she says has potential innovators stuck putting out ideas that are more likely to get consensus from the rest of their team. She instead suggested to allow employees to work alone first, to commit to an idea and elaborate on it before sharing it with a team.

“Brainstorming teams cause people to come to mediocre compromises,” she said.

The second shared trait of serial innovators Schilling discussed was self-efficacy.

“Self-efficacy is that faith you have that you can overcome obstacles to achieve your goals and it makes you take on bigger projects,” Schilling explained.

She pointed to Elon Musks’ persistence in developing reusable rockets, in spite of NASA’s claims that it couldn’t be done, and Nikola Tesla’s dream of harnessing the power of Niagara Falls to provide electricity, despite having only seen a picture of Niagara on a postcard when he was a child in Croatia.

“Encourage people to try even if they fail,” she said, and warned against rescuing people who could benefit from learning things on their own.

The third trait Schilling outlined was one she said seven of the eight innovators possessed, which was having an intensely idealistic goal that mattered more to them than just about anything else.

“When you have an idealistic goal that people in your company can identify with, they’re going to work harder, they’re going to work longer, they’re going to think bigger, and they’re going to love it more,” she said.

And while timing and luck often did play an undeniable role in many of the serial innovators lives, Schilling was most surprised to learn that access to capital didn’t affect her research subjects’ abilities to innovate.

“Every single one of these people… started out flat broke,” she said. “They did not become innovators because they had access to capital.”

What was more important, she said, was their access to other people who had resources.

“One of the most valuable things you can do is help connect people to the other people they need,” she concluded.

By Pete Singer

Many new innovations were discussed at imec’s U.S. International Technology Forum (ITF) on Monday at the Grand Hyatt in San Francisco, including quantum computing, artificial intelligence, sub-3nm logic, memory computing, solid-state batteries, EUV, RF and photonics, but perhaps the most interesting was new technology that enables human cells, tissues and organs to be grown and analyzed on-chip.

After an introduction by SEMI President Ajit Monacha – who said he believes the semiconductor industry will reach $1 trillion in market size by 2030 (“there’s no shortage of killer applications,” he said) — Luc Van den hove, president and CEO of imec, kicked off the afternoon session speaking about many projects underway that bring leading microelectronics technologies to bear on today’s looming healthcare crisis. “We all live longer than ever before and that’s fantastic,” he said. “But by living longer we also spend a longer part of our life being ill. What we need is a shift from extending lifespan to extending healthspan. What we need is to find ways to cure and prevent some of these diseases like cancer, like heart diseases and especially dementia.”

Today, drug development is so time-consuming and costly, is because of the insufficiency of the existing methodologies for drug screening assays. These current assays are based on poor cell models that limit the quality of the resulting data, and result in inadequate biological relevance. Additionally, there is a lack of spatial resolution of the assays, resulting in the inability to screen single cells in a cell culture. “It is rather slow, it is quite labor intensive and it provides limited information,” Van den hove said. “With our semiconductor platform we have developed recently a multi-electrode array (MEA) chip on which we can grow cells, in which we can grow tissue and organs. We can monitor processes that are happening within the cells or between the cells during massive drug testing.”

The MEA (see Figure) packs 16,384 electrodes, distributed over 16 wells, and offers multiparametric analysis. Each of the 1,024 electrodes in a well can detect intracellular action potentials, aside from the traditional extracellular signals. Further, imec’s chip is patterned with microstructures to allow for a structured cell growth mimicking a specific organ.

A novel organ-on-chip platform for pharmacological studies with unprecedented signal quality. It fuses imec’s high-density multi-electrode array (MEA)-chip with a microfluidic well plate, developed in collaboration with Micronit Microtechnologies, in which cells can be cultured, providing an environment that mimics human physiology.

Earlier this year, in May at imec’s ITF forum in Europe, Veerle Reumers, project leader at imec, explained how the MEA works: “By using grooves, heart cells can for example grow into a more heart-like tissue. In this way, we fabricate miniature hearts-on-a-chip, making it possible to test the effect of drugs in a more biologically relevant context. Imec’s organ-on-chip platform is the first system that enables on-chip multi-well assays, which means that you can perform different experiments or – in other words – analyze different compounds, in parallel on a single chip,” he explained. “This is a considerable increase in throughput compared to current single-well MEAs and we aim to further increase the throughput by adding more wells in a system.”

Van den hove said they have been testing the chip. “The beauty of the semiconductor platform is that we can, because of the miniaturization capability, parallelize an enormous amount of this testing and accelerate drug testing. We can measure what we never measured before, at speeds that you couldn’t think of before.”

He added that imec recently embarked on a new initiative aimed to cure dementia called Mission Lucidity. “Together with some of our clinical biomedical research teams, we are on a mission to decode dementia, to develop a cure to prevent this disease,” he said.

The MEA will be one tool used in the initiative, but also coming into play will be the groups neuroprobes — which Van den hove said are among the world’s most advanced probes and are being used by nearly all the leading neuroscience research teams – along with next generation wearables. “By combining these tools, we want to better understand the processes that are happening in the brain. We can measure those processes with much higher resolution than what could be done before. This may be able to detect the onset disease earlier on. By administering the right medication earlier, we hope to be able to prevent the disease from further progressing,” he said.

By Pete Singer

Increasingly complicated 3D structures such finFETs and 3D NAND require very high aspect ratio etches. This, in turn, calls for higher gas flow rates to improve selectivity and profile control. Higher gas flow rates also mean higher etch rates, which help throughput, and  higher rates of removal for etch byproducts.

“Gas flow rates are now approaching the limit of the turbopump,” said Dawn Stephenson, Business Development Manager – Chamber Solutions at Edwards Vacuum. “No longer is it only the process pressure that’s defining the size of the turbopump, it’s now also about how much gas you can put through the turbopump.”

Turbopumps operate by spinning rotors at very high rates of speed (Figure 1). These rotors propel gases and process byproducts down and out of the pump. The rotors are magnetically levitated (maglev) to reduce friction and increase rotor speed.

Figure 1. Spinning rotors propel gases and process byproducts out of the pump.

The challenge starts with processes that have high gas flow rates, over a thousand sccm, and lower chamber pressures, below 100 mTorr.  Such processes include chamber clean steps where high flows of oxygen-containing gases are used to remove and flush the process byproducts from inside the chamber, through Silicon via (TSV) in which SF6is widely used at high gas flowrates for deep silicon reactive ion etch (RIE) and more recently, gaseous chemical oxide removal (COR) which typically uses HF and NH3to remove oxide hard masks.

However, the challenge is intensified with the more general trend to higher aspect ratio etch across all technologies.

Stephenson said the maximum amount of gas you can put through a maglev turbo is determined by two things: the motor power and the rotor temperature. Both of these are affected adversely by the molecular weight of the gas. “The heavier the molecule, the lower the limit. For motor power, if the gas flow rate is increased, the load on the rotor is increased, and then you need more power. Eventually you reach a gas flow at which you exceed the amount of power you have to keep the rotor spinning and it will slow down,” she said.

The rotor temperature is an even bigger limiting factor. “As gas flow rates increase, the number of molecules hitting the rotor are increased. The amount of energy transferred into the rotors is also increased which elevates the temperature of the rotor. Because the rotor is suspended in a vacuum and because it’s levitated, it’s not very easy to remove that heat from the rotor because its primary thermal transfer is through radiation,” she explained.

Pumping heavier gases, particularly ones that have poor thermal conductivity, cause the rotor temperature to rise, leading to what is known as “rotor creep.”Rotor creep is material growth due to high temperature and centrifugal force (stress).  Rotor creep deformation over time narrows clearances between rotor and stator and can eventually lead to contact and catastrophic failure (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Edwards pumps have the highest benchmark for rotor creep life temperature in the industry, due to the use of a premium aluminum alloy as the base material for its mag-lev rotors, combined with a low stress design.

Where it gets even worse are in applications where the turbopump is externally heated to reduce byproduct deposition inside the pump. Such a heated pump will have a higher baseline rotor temperature and significantly lower allowable gas flowrates than an unheated one. This becomes a challenge particularly for the heated turbopumps on semiconductor etch and flat panel display processes using typical reactant gases such as HBr and SF6.  “Those are very heavy gases with low thermal conductivity and the maximum limit of the turbopump is actually quite low,” Stephenson said.

The good news is that Edwards has been diligently working to overcome these challenges. “What we have done to maximize the amount of gas you can put into our turbopumps is to  ensure our rotors can withstand the highest possible temperature design limit for a 10 year creep lifetime.   We use a premium alloy for the base rotor material and then beyond that we have done a lot of work with our proprietary modeling techniques to design a very low stress rotor because the creep is due to two factors: the temperature and the centrifugal stress. Because of those two things combined, we’re able to achieve the highest benchmark for rotor creep life temperature in the industry,” she said.

Furthermore, the company has worked on thermal optimization of the turbopump platform. “That means putting in thermal isolation where needed to try to help keep the rotor and motor cool. At the same time, we also need to keep the gas path hot to stop byproducts from depositing. We have also released a high emissivity rotor coating that helps keep the rotor cool,” Stephenson said. A corrosion resistant, black ceramic rotor coating is used to maximize heat radiation, which helps keep the rotor cool and gives more headroom on gas flowrate before the creep life temperature is reached.

Edwards has also developed a unique real-time rotor temperature sensor: Direct, dynamic rotor temperature reporting eliminates over-conservative estimated max gas flow limits and allows pump operation at real maximum gas flow in real duty cycle while maintaining safety and lifetime reliability.

In summary, enabling higher flows at lower process pressures is becoming a critical capability for advanced Etch applications, and Edwards have addressed this need with several innovations, including optimized rotor design to minimize creep, high emissivity coating, and real time temperature monitoring.

By Dave Lammers

The semiconductor industry is collecting massive amounts of data from fab equipment and other sources. But is the trend toward using that data in a Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0 approach happening fast enough in what Mike Plisinski, CEO of Rudolph Technologies, calls a “very conservative” chip manufacturing sector?

“There are a lot of buzzwords being thrown around now, and much of it has existed for a long time with APC, FDC, and other existing capabilities. What was inhibiting the industry in the past was the ability to align this huge volume of data,” Plisinskisaid.

While the industry became successful at adding sensors to tools and collecting data, the ability to track that data and make use of it in predictive maintenance or other analytics thus far “has had minimal success,” he said. With fab processes and manufacturing supply chains getting more complex, customers are trying to figure out how to move beyond implementing statistical process control (SPC) on data streams.

What is the next step? Plisinski said now that individual processes are well understood, the next phase is data alignment across the fab’s systems. As control of leading-edge processes becomes more challenging, customers realize that the interactions between the process steps must be understood more deeply.

“Understanding these interactions requires aligning these digital threads and data streams. When a customer understands that when a chamber changes temperature by point one degrees Celsius, it impacts the critical dimensions of the lithography process by X, Y, and Z. Understanding those interactions has been a significant challenge and is an area that we have focused on from a variety of angles over the last five years,” Plisinski said.

Rudolph engineers have worked to integrate multiple data threads (see Figure), aligning various forms of data into one database for analysis by Rudolph’s Yield Management System (YMS). “For a number of years we’ve been able to align data. The limitation was in the database: the data storage, the speed of retrieval and analysis were limitations. Recently new types of databases have come out, so that instead of relational, columnar-type databases, the new databases have been perfect for factory data analysis, for streaming data. That’s been a huge enabler for the industry,” he said.

Rudolph engineers have worked to integrate multiple data threads into one database.

Leveraging AI’s capabilities

A decade ago, Rudolph launched an early neural-network based system designed to help customers optimize yields. The software analyzed data from across a fab to learn from variations in the data.

“The problem back then was that neural networks of this kind used non-linear math that was too new for our conservative industry, an industry accustomed to first principle analytics. As artificial intelligence has been used in other industries, AI is becoming more accepted worldwide, and our industry is also looking at ways to leverage some of the capabilities of artificial intelligence,” he said.

Collecting and making use of data with a fab is “no small feat,” Plisinskisaid, but that leads to sharing and aligning data across the value chain: the wafer fab, packaging and assembly, and others.

“To gain increased insights from the data streams or digital threads, to bring these threads all together and make sense of all of it. It is what I call weaving a fabric of knowledge: taking individual data threads, bringing them together, and weaving a much clearer picture of what’s going on.”

Security concerns run deep

One of the biggest challenges is how to securely transfer data between the different factories that make up the supply chain. “Even if they are owned by one entity, transferring that large volume of data, even if it’s over a private dedicated network, is a big challenge. If you start to pick and choose to summarize the data, you are losing some of the benefit. Finding that balance is important.”

The semiconductor industry is gaining insights from companies analyzing, for instance, streaming video. The network infrastructures, compression algorithms, transfers of information from mobile wireless devices, and other technologies are making it easier to connect semiconductor fabs.

“Security is perhaps the biggest challenge. It’s a mental challenge as much as a technical one, and by that I mean there is more than reluctance, there’s a fundamental disdain for letting the data out of a factory, for even letting data into the factory,” he said.

Within fabs, there is a tug of war between equipment vendors which want to own the data and provide value-add services, and customers who argue that since they own the tools they own the data. The contentious debate grows more intense when vendors talk about taking data out of the fab. “That’s one of the challenges that the industry has to work on — the concerns around security and competitive information getting leaked out.” Developing a front-end process is “a multibillion dollar bet, and if that data leaks out it can be devastating to market-share leadership,” Plisinski said.

Early adopter stories

The challenge facing Rudolph and other companies is to convince their customers of the value of sharing data; that “the benefits will outweigh their concerns. Thus far, the proof of the benefit has been somewhat limited.”

“At least from a Rudolph perspective, we’ve had some early adopters that have seen some significant benefits. And I think as those stories get out there and as we start to highlight what some of these early adopters have seen, others at the executive level in these companies will start to question their teams about some of their assumptions and concerns. Eventually I think we’ll find a way forward. But right now that’s a significant challenge,”Plisinski said.

It is a classic chicken-and-egg problem, making it harder to get beyond theories to case-study benefits. “What helped us is that some of the early adopters had complete control of their entire value chain. They were fully integrated. And so we were able to get over the concerns about data sharing and focus on the technical challenges of transferring all that data and centralizing it in one place for analytical purposes. From there we got to see the benefits and document them in a way that we could share with others, while protecting IP.”

Aggregating data, buying databases and analytical software, building algorithms – all cost money, in most cases adding up to millions of dollars. But if yields improve by .25 or half a percent, the payback comes in six to eight months, he said.

“It’s a very conservative industry, an applied science type of industry. Trying to prove the value of software — a kind of black magic exercise — has always been difficult. But as the industry’s problems have become so complex, it is requiring these sophisticated software solutions.”

“We will have examples of successful case studies in our booth during SEMICON West. Anyone wanting further information is invited to stop by and talk to our experts,” adds Plisinski.

Market shares of semiconductor equipment manufacturers shifted significantly in Q1 2018 as Applied Materials, the top supplier dropped, according to the report “Global Semiconductor Equipment: Markets, Market Shares, Market Forecasts,” recently published by The Information Network, a New Tripoli-based market research company.

The chart below shows shares for the first quarter (Q1) of calendar year 2017 and 2018. Market shares are for equipment only, excluding service and spare parts, and have been converted for revenues of foreign companies to U.S. dollars on a quarterly exchange rate.

Applied Materials lost significant market share YoY, from 18.4% of the $13.1 billion Q1 2017 market to 17.7% of the $17.0 billion Q1 2018 market. This drop follows a 1.8 share-point loss by Applied Materials for CY 2017 compared to 2016. The company competes with Lam Research and TEL in the deposition and etch market, and both gained share at the expense of Applied Materials.

At the other end of the spectrum, smaller semiconductor companies making up the “other” category lost 2.4 share points as a whole.

Much of the equipment revenue growth was attributed to strong growth in the DRAM and NAND sectors, as equipment was installed in memory manufacturers Intel, Micron Technology, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, Toshiba, and Western Digital. The memory sector, which grew grown 61.5% in 2017, is forecast to add another 28.5% in 2018 according to industry consortium WSTS (World Semiconductor Trade Statistics).

TEL recorded growth of 120.3% YoY in Korea, much of it on NAND and DRAM sales to Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, and 69.5% YoY in Japan, much of it on NAND sales to Toshiba at its Fab 6 in Kitakami, Japan. Lam Research gained 42.2% and 70.5% YoY, respectively, in Korea and Japan.

Following the strong growth in the semiconductor equipment market, The Information Network projects another 11.5% growth in 2018 for semiconductor equipment.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research, today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $38.7 billion for the month of May 2018, an increase of 21.0 percent compared to the May 2017 total of $32.0 billion. Global sales in May were 3 percent higher than the April 2018 total of $37.6 billion. All monthly sales numbers are compiled by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization and represent a three-month moving average.

“The global semiconductor market has posted consistent growth of greater than 20 percent for 14 consecutive months, and May 2018 marked the industry’s highest-ever monthly sales,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association. “The Americas led the way once again, with sales increasing by more than 30 percent compared to last year, and sales were up across all major semiconductor product categories on both a year-to-year and month-to-month basis.”

Year-to-year sales increased solidly across all regions: the Americas (31.6 percent), China (28.5 percent), Europe (18.7 percent), Japan (14.7 percent), and Asia Pacific/All Other (8.7 percent). Month-to-month sales increased more modestly across all regions: China (6.3 percent), Japan (2.6 percent), Asia Pacific/All Other (1.2 percent), the Americas (1.1 percent), and Europe (1.0 percent).

The SiC power market is now on the road, asserts Yole Développement (Yole). Therefore, since 2017, the market research and strategy consulting company identified more than 20 strategic announcements, showing the dynamism of this market and attractiveness of the technology. Rohm, Bombardier, Cree, SDK, STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, Littelfuse, Ascatron and more are part of the powerful ecosystem, presenting innovative products and revealing key partnerships and/or M&A .

Today, SiC transistors are clearly being adopted, penetrating smoothly into different applications. Yole’s analysts forecast a US$1.4 billion SiC power semiconductor market by 2023. According to the Power & Wireless team at Yole, this market is showing a 29% CAGR between 2017 and 2023.
Power SiC report, 2018 edition presents Yole’s deep understanding of SiC penetration in different applications including xEV, xEV charging infrastructure, PFC/power supply, PV, UPS, motor drives, wind and rail. In addition, it highlights the state-of-the-art SiC-based devices, modules, and power stacks. Yole’s analysts also describe the SiC power industrial landscape from materials to systems, and analyze of SiC power market dynamics. This report proposes a detailed quantification of the SiC power device market until 2023, in value and volume.

SiC adoption is accelerating: is the supply chain ready? Yole’s analysts reveal today their vision of the SiC industry.

SiC market is still being driven by diodes used in PFC and PV applications. However Yole expects that in five years from now the main SiC device market driver will be transistors, with an impressive 50% CAGR for 2017-2023.

This adoption is partially thanks to the improvement of the transistor performance and reliability compared to the first generation of products, which gives confidence to customers for implementation.

Another key trend revealed by Yole’s analysts is the SiC adoption by automotive players, over the next 5-10 years. “Its implementation rate differs depending on where SiC is being used,” comments Dr. Hong Lin, Technology and Market Analyst, Compound Semiconductors at Yole. “That could be in the main inverter, in OBC or in the DC/DC converter. By 2018, more than 20 automotive companies are already using SiC SBDs or SiC MOSFET transistors for OBC, which will lead to 44% CAGR through to 2023.”

Yole expects SiC adoption in the main inverter by some pioneers, with an inspiring 108% market CAGR for 2017-2023. This will be possible because nearly all carmakers have projects to implement SiC in the main inverter in coming years. In particular, Chinese automotive players are strongly considering the adoption of SiC.

The recent SiC module developed by STMicroelectronics for Tesla and its Model 3 is a good example of this early adoption. The SiC-based inverter, analyzed by System Plus Consulting, Yole’s sister company is composed of 24 1-in-1 power modules. Each module contains two SiC MOSFETs with an innovative die attach solution and connected directly on the terminals with copper clips and thermally dissipated by copper baseplates. The thermal dissipation of the modules is performed thanks to a specifically designed pin-fin heatsink.

“SiC MOSFET is manufactured with the latest STMicroelectronics technology design,” explains Dr. Elena Barbarini, Head of Department Devices at System Plus Consulting. “This technical choice allows reduction of conduction losses and switching losses”. STMicroelectronics is strongly involved in the development of SiC-based modules for the automotive industry. During its recent Capital Markets Day, the leading player details its activities in this field (Source: Automotive & Discrete Group presentation – May 2018). STMicroelectronics is also commited in the development of innovative packaging solutions. . System Plus Consulting proposes today a complete teardown analysis including a detailed estimation of the production cost of the module and its package.

PV has also caught the attention of Yole’s analysts during recent months. China claimed almost the half of the world’s installations in the last year. However due to new governmental regulations, Yole sees a slow down of the PV market in short term and has lowered its expectation of SiC penetration for the segment.

In general, system manufacturers are interested in implementing cost effective systems which are reliable, without any technology choice, either silicon or SiC. “Today, even if it’s certified that SiC performs better than silicon, system manufacturers still get questions about long term reliability and the total cost of the SiC inverter”, comments Ana Villamor, Technology & Market Analyst, Power Electronics & Compound Semiconductors at Yole.

Yole and System Plus Consulting teams will attend SEMICON Europa 2018 (Munich, Germany – November 13-16). During the leading trade show, Dr. Milan Rosina, Senior Technology & Market Analyst, Power Electronics & Batteries at Yole proposes a dedicated WBG presentation on November 15 at 2:30 PM.

SiC and GaN devices have demonstrated their large potential for power electronic applications. During the presentation “GaN and SiC power device: market overview” taken place during the Power Electronics Session, Dr. Rosina proposes an overview of the market, technology and the industrial supply chain. More information available on i-micronews.com, Conferences & Trade Shows section.

By Paula Doe, SEMI

New metrology and inspection technologies and new analysis approaches made possible by improving compute technology offer solutions to finding the increasingly subtle variations in materials and subsystems that meet specifications but still cause defects on the wafer. More collaboration across the supply chain is helping too.  SEMICON West programs on materials and subsystems will address these issues.

New metrology approaches needed to deal with process margin challenges

As device process margins shrink and subtler materials variations cause unwanted variations,  the need for better monitoring of both surface and sub-surface material variations is driving a trend towards “metro-spection” – the convergence of metrology and inspection. “Device process margins have eroded to the point that traditional metrology strategies and techniques are no longer viable for controlling yield and parametric performance,” says Nanometrics Vice President Robert Fiordalice, who will speak in the materials program at SEMICON West. “Limited sampling capability, low throughput, insufficient sensitivity or the destructive nature of the techniques can often become problems. What’s more, deviations in material characteristics are not always determined by the initial quality of the material, but often arise from variations during the integration of the materials.”

“Device process margins have eroded to the point that traditional metrology strategies and techniques are no longer viable for controlling yield and parametric performance.” – Robert Fiordalice, Nanometrics

One new type of inline tool or line monitoring technology is Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, traditionally used in quality control or tool characterization. Better sensitivity and higher throughput now enable rapid analysis and feedback for on-the-fly detection of subtle deviations in film properties that may compromise device performance or yield.

More advanced analytics will help extract new information from old metrology

More expensive metrology may not be required to identify subtle variations in in-spec materials that cause wafer defects. Today’s advanced compute capabilities now enable more sophisticated analysis of existing data and the identification of small but significant variations in raw materials and finished goods.

The figure of merit (FoM) values presented in certificate of analysis (CoA) reports miss subtle variations in raw material properties. Of particular note is the reduction of molecular weight distributions to a mean, and standard deviation, whereas variations in the tails are associated with pattern defects. Advanced compute capabilities now allow the industry to step beyond the FoM in favor of more holistic measures, enabling predictive analysis of resist chemical variations associated with specific pattern defects. Source: JSR Micro

“We often don’t need to find a new measure, but just a new way of looking at what we measure now,” says Jim Mulready, vice president of global quality assurance at JSR Micro. Mulready will speak in the SEMICON West program on materials defectivity issues. “The certificate of analysis reduces multiple measurements to a single figure of merit. But if we ignore all that raw data, we miss a chance to learn.  One of our sayings in quality is ‘Customers don’t feel the average, they feel the variation.’ In many electronic materials, the quality of the raw material can have a big impact on the final performance, but the types of analysis needed to look at the tails of the distribution of these measures (such as molecular weight) in detail used to be really hard to do. Now it’s becoming increasingly straightforward and affordable.”

 “We often don’t need to find a new measure, but just a new way looking at what we measure now.” – Jim Mulready, JSR Micro

Mulready says tools now available in the data processing sector enable the identification of subtle variations in materials that can cause defects on the wafer. These tools use methods like detailed subtractions of chromatography curves of polymer raw materials or analysis of tails of distributions of molecular weights. “Our job now is to drive these kinds of more sophisticated data analysis back into our chemical supply chain as well,” says Mulready. “We must work more closely with our suppliers to integrate their raw materials into our products. The reason the JSRs of the world exist is as a safety valve to reduce the variation from the chemical industry before it gets to the fab.”

Continued collaboration with equipment suppliers required as well

While the industry has been talking about the need for tighter collaboration between materials suppliers and equipment manufacturers for years, it still doesn’t always happen. “The material supplier and the equipment maker are tied together like kids in a three-legged race when we deliver an integrated system for consistent on-wafer performance,” says Cristina Chu, TEL/NEXX director of strategic business development, another speaker in the materials program.  “When we introduce changes to the tool hardware, we need to make sure it doesn’t upset the system. Similarly, we need the material supplier to send a bottle over when a new chemistry formulation is under development. If a new chemistry runs into problems in the field, it will take much more time for both of us to fix it at the customer site. The toolmaker can provide a slightly different perspective on applications, while being more objective than a customer on how the formulation performs compared to earlier versions.”

“The material supplier and the equipment maker are tied together like kids in a three-legged race when we deliver an integrated system for consistent on-wafer performance.” – Cristina Chu, TEL/NEXX

Regular and ongoing collaboration between chemistry suppliers and toolmakers enables the highest quality system solution to reach the customer. Chu notes that her team tries to maintain consistent collaborations with material suppliers across changes in organizations as the business environment changes. “For consistent on-wafer capabilities, we need a consistent collaboration process with chemistry suppliers. We need to meet with materials providers at a regular cadence throughout their development process. We need to check back with them as we scale up results from the coupon to the wafer level and to work out the kinks in the integrated solution together. The quality and consistency of our combined performance at the customer depends on ensuring the quality and consistency of our development and evaluation process as well.”

Fabs and subsystems suppliers look to pilot data sharing program to improve process margins

With ever tighter process margins, subtle variations in parameters that don’t appear in the specifications are also compromising results on the wafer, and neither the fab nor the supplier alone has the full information needed to improve performance. To help, a SEMI standards group is developing a protocol for a pilot program to standardize and automate some data sharing.

“In order for engineers to have constructive conversations about how to improve performance, we all need to exchange more information.” – Eric Bruce, Samsung Austin

The fab knows that performance is best with a particular parameter value, and knows when performance fluctuates,  but often faces a black box problem with no way of knowing what exactly is wrong. In the rush to get the tool back up, the fab engineers may not get around to emailing the supplier about the issue for some time. The subsystems supplier, on the other hand, may know the cause of the variation,  but likely has no way of knowing the critical parameters or ideal target valuesfor the fab’s process..  “In order for engineers to have constructive conversations about how to improve performance, we all need to exchange more information,” says Eric Bruce, Samsung Austin diffusion engineer, and co-chair of the SEMI standards effort working on the issue, who will speak in the subsystems program at SEMICON West.

A potential solution could be to create a standard and automated process to share particular data, agreed to in the purchasing contract, whereby the subsystems supplier shares more information about their parameters with the fab, and the fab in return gives feedback on what parameters work best to drive improved performance. The best place to start will likely be on parts that do not contain core yield-related IP, but where usage and lifetime information is useful.

“We’re looking for people to participate in a pilot program to work together with suppliers to try sharing some information to improve performance,” says Bruce. “There’s a lot of this sharing in the backroom anyway, but this could make it fast and automated, and make everyone’s engineering job a lot easier.”