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In addition to the monthly Updates, IC Insights’ subscription to The McClean Report includes three “subscriber only” webcasts.  The first of these webcasts was presented on August 3, 2016 and discussed semiconductor industry capital spending trends, the worldwide economic outlook, the semiconductor industry forecast through 2020, as well as China’s failures and successes on its path to increasing its presence in the IC industry.

In total, IC Insights forecasts that semiconductor industry capital spending will increase by only 3% this year after declining by 2% in 2015.  However, driven by the top three spenders—Samsung, TSMC, and Intel—capital spending in 2016 is expected to be heavily skewed toward the second half of this year. Figure 1 shows that the combined 2016 outlays for the top three semiconductor industry spenders are forecast to be 90% higher in the second half of this year as compared to the first half.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Combined, the “Big 3” spenders are forecast to represent 45% of the total semiconductor industry outlays this year.  An overview of each company’s actual 1H16 spending and their 2H16 spending outlook is shown below.

Samsung — The company spent only about $3.4 billion in capital expenditures in 1H16, just 31% of its forecasted $11.0 billion full-year 2016 budget.

TSMC — Its outlays in the first half of 2016 were only $3.4 billion, leaving $6.6 billion to be spent in the second half of this year in order to reach its full-year $10.0 billion budget.  This would represent a 2H16/1H16 spending increase of 92%.

Intel — Spent just $3.6 billion in 1H16.  The company needs to spend $5.9 billion in the second half of this year to reach its current $9.5 billion spending budget, which would be a 2H16/1H16 increase of 61%.

In contrast to the “Big 3” spenders, capital outlays by the rest of the semiconductor suppliers are forecast to shrink by 16% in the second half of this year as compared to the first half.  In total, 2H16 semiconductor industry capital spending is expected to be up 20% over 1H16 outlays, setting up a busy period for the semiconductor equipment suppliers through the end of this year.

Further trends and analysis relating to semiconductor capital spending through 2020 are covered in the 250-plus-page Mid-Year Update to the 2016 edition of The McClean Report.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research, today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $79.1 billion during the second quarter of 2016, an increase of 1.0 percent over the previous quarter and a decrease of 5.8 percent compared to the second quarter of 2015. Global sales for the month of June 2016 reached $26.4 billion, an uptick of 1.1 percent over last month’s total of $26.1 billion, but down 5.8 percent from the June 2015 total of $28.0 billion. Cumulatively, year-to-date sales during the first half of 2016 were 5.8 percent lower than they were at the same point in 2015. All monthly sales numbers are compiled by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization and represent a three-month moving average.

“Global semiconductor sales increased slightly from Q1 to Q2 but remain behind the pace from last year, due largely to global economic uncertainty and sluggish demand,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association. “Sales into Japan and China have been a bright spot midway through 2016, and a modest rebound in sales is projected during the second half of the year.”

Regionally, sales increased compared to June 2015 in China (1.7 percent), but fell in Asia Pacific/All Other (-11.0 percent), the Americas (-10.8 percent), Europe (-5.5 percent), and Japan (-1.3 percent). Sales were up slightly compared to last month in the Americas (3.0 percent), China (2.2 percent) and Europe (1.7 percent), but down somewhat in Japan (-1.0 percent) and Asia Pacific/All Other (-0.6 percent).

sales graph sales table

200mm fabs reawakening


July 13, 2016

By David Lammers, Contributing Editor

Buoyed by strong investments in China, 200mm wafer production is seeing a re-awakening, with overall 200mm capacity expected to match its previous 2006 peak level by 2019 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. By 2019, 200mm fab capacity should be close to the previous peak seen in 2006, according to SEMI. Several new 200mm fabs are expected to open in China. (Source: SEMICON West presentation by Christian Dieseldorff).

Figure 1. By 2019, 200mm fab capacity should be close to the previous peak seen in 2006, according to SEMI. Several new 200mm fabs are expected to open in China. (Source: SEMICON West presentation by Christian Dieseldorff).

Speaking at a SEMI/Gartner market symposium at SEMICON West, SEMI senior analyst Christian Dieseldorff said over the next few years “we don’t see 200mm fabs closing, in fact we see new ones beginning operation. To me, that is just amazing.”

The numbers back up the rebound. Excluding LEDs, the installed capacity of 200mm fabs will reach about 5.3 million wafers per month (wspm) in 2018, almost matching the 2007 peak of 5.6 million wspm. As shown in Figure 1, By 2019 as new 200mm fabs start up in China, 200mm wafer production will surge beyond the previous 2007 peak, a surprising achievement for a wafer generation that began more than 25 years ago. Figure 2 shows how capacity, which held steady for years, is now on the increase.

Figure 2. 200mm fab capacity, which remained relatively constant for years, is now increasing.

Figure 2. 200mm fab capacity, which remained relatively constant for years, is now increasing.

Case in point: On the opening day of Semicon West, Beijing Yangdong Micro announced a new OLED 200mm fab that will be opening in the second half of 2018 to make OLED drivers, according to Dieseldorff.

Over the past few years, Japan-based companies have closed 10 200mm fabs, mostly outdated logic facilities, while expanding production of discrete power and analog ICs on 200mm wafers. But with China opening several new 200mm fabs and the expansions of existing 200mm fabs worldwide, SEMI sees an additional 274,000 wafer starts per month of 200mm production over the 2015-2018 period, adding expansions and additional fabs, and subtracting closed facilities.

“One message from our research is that we believe the existing 200mm fabs are full. Companies have done what they can to expand and move tools around, and that is coming to an end,” he said. SEMI reckons that 19 new 200mm fabs have been built since 2010, at least six of them in China.

SEMI’s Christian Dieseldorff.

SEMI’s Christian Dieseldorff.

Dieseldorff touched on a vexing challenge to the 200mm expansion: the availability of 200mm equipment. “People have problems getting 200mm equipment, used and even new. The (200mm) market is not well understood by some companies,” he said. With a shortage of used 200mm equipment likely to continue, the major equipment companies are building new 200mm tools, part of what Dieseldorff described as an “awakening” of 200mm manufacturing.

 

China is serious

Sam Wang, a research vice president at Gartner who focuses on the foundry sector, voiced several concerns related to 200mm production at the SEMI/Gartner symposium. While SMIC (which has a mix of 200mm and 300mm fabs) has seen consistently healthy annual growth, the five second-tier Chinese foundries – — Shanghai Huahong Grace, CSMC, HuaLi, XMC, and ASMC — saw declining revenues year-over-year in 2015. Overall, China-based foundries accounted for just 7.8 percent of total foundry capacity last year, and the overall growth rate by Chinese foundries “is way below the expectations of the Chinese government,” Wang said.

The challenge, he said, is for China’s foundries which rely largely on legacy production to grow revenues in a competitive market. And things are not getting any easier. While production of has shown overall strength in units, Wang cautioned that price pressures are growing for many of the ICs made on 200mm wafers. Fingerprint sensor ICs, for example, have dropped in price by 30 percent recently. Moreover, “the installation of legacy nodes in 300mm fabs by large foundries has caused concern to foundries who depend solely on 200 mm.”

But Wang emphasized China’s determination to expand its semiconductor production. “China is really serious. Believe it,” he said.

New markets, new demand

The smart phone revolution has energized 200mm production, adding to a growing appetite for MEMS sensors, analog, and power ICs. Going forward, the Internet of Things, new medical devices, and flexible and wearable products may drive new demand, speakers said at the symposium.

Jason Marsh, director of technology for the government and industry-backed NextFlex R&D alliance based in San Jose, Calif., said many companies see “real potential” in making products which have “an unobtrusive form factor that doesn’t alter the physical environment.” He cited one application: a monitoring device worn by hospital patients that would reduce the occurrence of bed sores. These types of devices can be made with “comparatively yesteryear (semiconductor) technology” but require new packaging and system-level expertise.

Legacy devices made on 200mm wafers could get a boost from the increasing ability to combine several chips made with different technologies into fan out chip scale packages (FO CSPs). Bill Chen, a senior advisor at ASE Group, showed several examples of FO CSPs which combine legacy ICs with processors made on leading-edge nodes. “When we started this wafer-level development around 2000 we thought it would be a niche. But now about 30 percent of the ICs used in smart phones are in wafer-level CSPs. It just took a lot of time for the market forces to come along.”

More coverage from this year’s SEMICON West can be found here.

By Shannon Davis, Web Editor

“There’s never been a better time to connect” was the theme of John Kern’s keynote address at SEMICON West 2016 Tuesday morning, though it was clear from his speech that connecting – or digitizing – supply chains is not just a good idea, but imperative in the current ever-changing climate of the electronics supply chain.

John Kern, Vice President of Supply Chains, Cisco Systems, speaking at SEMICON West 2016 on Tuesday morning. (Source: SEMI)

John Kern, Senior Vice President of Supply Chains, Cisco Systems, speaking at SEMICON West 2016 on Tuesday morning. (Source: SEMI)

“If you’re not investing in digitization today, it’s going to be very, very difficult for you to remain relevant over the next decade,” Kern urged his audience.

Kern, who is Senior Vice President of Supply Chains at Cisco Systems, came equipped with several compelling case studies from his team’s own experiments, to make the case for why connecting the supply chain is so vital to innovation and profitability.

The first case study that Kern presented showed Cisco’s results from monitoring energy and energy costs in a factory setting. His team deployed a network of thousands of sensors that monitored energy readings of every piece of equipment in one of Cisco’s Malaysian factories, so teams could gather data and analytics on each piece’s performance. This initiative allowed the factory team to make changes in equipment to optimize performance, which resulted in a 12% energy reduction and a 1 million USD cost savings, which amounted to a full return on investment achieved in less than 10 months.

Kern also envisions a path to tens of millions of dollars in capital savings each year with adaptive testing, an initiative that’s currently saving Cisco test engineers man hours and allowing them to return to high value work. Kern said that Cisco was able to leverage analytics capabilities of a software they owned called Auto Test, along with Cisco’s own 10-15 years of test information, to build a test system that is now capable of machine-to-machine learning.

“The tests are becoming adaptive; they’re changing themselves,” said Kern, “and they’re notifying the engineers when they’re making a change.”

In addition to the cost and time savings, Kern believes this also allows for engineers to develop higher quality products.

And these products are also reaching the market faster, thanks to a Cloud-based supplier collaboration platform Cisco is using, that is allowing all of their suppliers to see real-time changes in demand and real-time changes in supply response, eliminating the bull-whip effect in the supply chain.

“We’ve also seen substantial improvement in product lead time,” Kern said. “We’re able to solve issues [with our suppliers] in a much faster way.”

Ultimately, this is where Kern says Cisco and its supply chain is headed: to what he calls supply chain orchestration.

“We’re trying to move this from a big IT project to having literally hundreds of people in our supply chain that are equipped to change the nature of their work every day,” he said. “If they understand the technology, they’re empowered to change the nature of their work.”

“This is the path for breakthrough productivity,” he concluded. “If you’re not investing heavily in these concepts today, it will be hard for you to stay relevant in the next decade.”

SEMI projects that the worldwide semiconductor equipment market will be flat this year and will rebound in 2017 according to the mid-year edition of the SEMI Capital Equipment Forecast, released today at the SEMICON West exposition. SEMI forecasts that the total semiconductor equipment market will grow 1 percent in 2016 (reaching $36.9 billion) after contracting 3 percent in 2015. An increase of 11 percent is expected in 2017 for the market to reach $41.1 billion.

The following results are given in terms of market size in billions of U.S. dollars and percentage growth over the prior year:

SEMI® 2016 Mid-Year Equipment Forecast by Market Region

By EQUIPMENT TYPE

year-over-year

year-over-year

2015

2016F

% Change

2017F

% Change
Wafer Processing

28.78

29.33

1.9%

33.09

12.8%
Test

3.33

3.36

0.9%

3.46

3.0%
Assembly & Packaging

2.51

2.39

-5.0%

2.48

4.0%
Other Front End

1.90

1.86

-2.1%

2.05

10.2%

Total 

36.52

36.94

1.1%

41.08

11.2%

 

By REGION year-over-year year-over-year

2015

2016F

% Change

2017F

% Change
China

4.90

6.41

30.8%

7.24

12.9%
Europe

1.95

2.07

6.2%

2.46

18.8%
Japan

5.49

5.08

-7.6%

4.72

-7.0%
Korea

7.46

6.17

-17.3%

7.99

29.5%
North America

5.12

4.62

-9.8%

4.97

7.6%
ROW

1.97

3.13

58.9%

3.68

17.6%
Taiwan

9.63

9.46

-1.8%

10.02

5.9%

Total

36.52

36.94

1.1%

41.08

11.2%

*Totals may not add due to rounding; Source: SEMI, July 2016; Equipment Market Data Subscription (EMDS)

Equipment spending had a slow start in the beginning of the year and is expected to accelerate in the second half of the year. Spending growth will continue into 2017 driven by foundries, memory (both 3D NAND and DRAM), MPU, Power, and investments in China. Front-end wafer processing equipment is forecast to grow 2 percent in 2016 to total $29.3 billion, up from $28.8 billion in 2015.  The Test equipment segment is expected to total $3.4 billion, essentially flat when compared to last year. Assembly and packaging equipment and Other Front End equipment are forecast to contract this year, falling to $2.4 billion (-5 percent) and $1.9 billion (-2 percent), respectively.

“After a tepid 2015, device manufacturers are beginning to ramp their investments in key industry segments,” said Denny McGuirk, president and CEO of SEMI. “We expect capital spending to improve for the remainder of 2016 and into 2017.”

Taiwan is forecast to continue as the world’s largest spender with $9.5 billion estimated for 2016 and $10.0 billion for 2017. In 2016, China is projected to be the second largest spender at $6.4 billion, followed by Korea at $6.2 billion. For 2017, Taiwan is projected to maintain its leading position while the market in Korea will nudge past the market in China.

In 2016, year-over-year increases are expected to be largest for Rest of World (59 percent), China (31 percent), and Europe (6 percent). Projected year-over-year percentage increases for 2017 are forecast to be largest for Korea (30 percent increase), Europe (19 percent), Rest of World (18 percent) and China (13 percent). Visit www.semi.org/en/MarketInfo for more information.

By Ed Korcynzski, Sr. Technical Editor

The near-term outlook for semiconductor manufacturing is challenging, with revenues down slightly but equipment spending up a bit, as reported by experts during the SEMI/Gartner Market Symposium held yesterday afternoon. The global economy is facing extreme uncertainty and is still recovering from the 2008/2009 financial crisis. Duncan Meldrum, Chief Economist with Hilltop Economics, explained why the after-shocks of the 2008/2009 global financial crisis combined with current political uncertainties result in a difficult investment environment. Compared to the 1993-2007 era when world real GDP was +3.2%, there are many indicators that the current ~2.3% GDP growth is the ‘new normal.’

“Rolling recessions in different regions have been pulling down global growth,” explained Meldrum. “Before the financial crisis, all the growth rates tended to be together in a coordinated global market. We’re actually seeing potential growth cut in half compared to what it was before the recession. That will create a new speed limit on the global economy, so it’ll be a tougher world than we’re used to.” These are high level macro-economic global investment numbers, but there’s a high correlation between these numbers and semiconductor industry silicon wafer processing in Millions of Square Inches (MSI).

Capital equipment forecast

Bob Johnson, Gartner research vice president, presented the outlook for semiconductor capital equipment, based on Garner’s economic model assumptions:

  • Consumer demand will remain weak,
  • High inventory of chips in all channels,
  • NAND and DRAM in oversupply for the rest of 2016,
  • Demand weakness continues longer term,
  • No new significant demand driver, and
  • Uncertain global economic climate post-Brexit.

Gartner is not bullish on the Internet-of-Things (IoT) to provide a next wave of demand. Premium smart-phones are expected to soon saturate global markets, and PC markets see weak consumer demand. In emerging markets, smartphones will take the majority of disposable income, which lowers new PC and tablet purchases by 10% through 2020.

NAND Flash is the long-term bright spot in the industry, with most of the growth driven by solid-state drives (SSD). However short-term oversupply in the second-half of 2016 is expected due to weak end markets, and increased output of planar 3bit/cell products. 3D-NAND represents 19% of the PetaBytes (PB) of total demand in 2016, increasing dramatically to 70% by 2020. SSDs are not just for PCs and mobile devices, but are moving into the enterprise segment and data centers, and 84% of SSDS will use 3D-NAND by 2020.

“3D-NAND manufacturing represents a major shift from litho-centric to etch-centric processing,” reminded Johnson. “The cost structures is still not competitive with 2D-NAND, but there will still be ~300k wafer-starts-per-month in the fourths quarter of 2016. By 2018, 3D-NAND will be half of the total NAND bits produced.” In response to 3D-NAND competition, 2D-NAND suppliers will likely do another shrink using their fully depreciated fabs, which will contribute to short-term oversupply.

Chinese foundry plans

Sam Wong, Gartner research vice president, discussed challenges of the foundry market related to China’s plans to develop domestic IC fab capability that is globally competitive. “Believe that China is really serious this time, with $140B investment,” said Wong. “The SOC capability of China is world-standard.”

For foundry markets in general, with increases in the number of mask layers with successive nodes the selling prices for finished wafers has to continue increasing. Wafer costs for fabless customers buying from foundries are now <$4K for 28nm-node, and <$7K for 14nm-node. TSMC ramped 14nm in one-half-year, and reports unprecedentedly low defects per mask layer to allow them to produce large Apple chips with high yield.

Packaging trends and china

Jim Walker, Gartner vice president of research, presented on “Semiconductor Packaging: the crucial growth component in China’s electronics supply chain.” IC manufacturing is critical to the economic growth and national security of China, and it is part of the ‘made in China 2015’ plan issued by China’s State Council.

China todays has already invested sufficient resources to now have ~1/3 of the global floor-space in Outsourced Semiconductor Assembly and Test (OSAT) facilities, while the percent of global revenue taken by Chinese companies is still much less. Since China has updated investment plans earlier this year, both South Korea and Taiwan industry organizations issued public statements of the need for strategic counter-investments. The semiconductor industry production in Taiwan represents ~13% of its total GDP, so China’s investment into this market is seen as a major threat.

PC shipments in India totalled nearly 2 million units in the first quarter of 2016, a 7.4 percent decrease over the first quarter of 2015, according to Gartner, Inc.

“Consumers accounted for 45 percent of total PC sales in the first quarter of 2016, down from 48 percent in the first quarter of 2015,” said Vishal Tripathi, research director at Gartner. “There was decline in both the enterprise and consumer segments in buying in the first quarter of 2016. With the first quarter being the end of the financial year for some companies, there were expectations that enterprises would exhaust their budgets. However, it did not have much of an impact on the PC market, and the market continues to face a challenging time.”

White boxes (including parallel imports), which accounted for 28 percent of the overall desktop market, declined 6 percent in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015. In the first quarter, mobile PCs declined by 13 percent year-on-year primarily due to a lack of enthusiasm in consumer buying. In the first quarter of 2016, PC vendors had excess inventory that was carried forward from the fourth quarter of 2015 . Gartner analysts believe that inventory will be carried forward into the second quarter of 2016.

HP was in the number one position in PC shipments in India in the first quarter of 2016 (see Table 1) due to a strong presence in channels and online consumer purchases.

Table 1

India PC Market Share Estimates for First Quarter of 2016 (Percentage of Shipments)

Vendors

1Q16 Market Share (%)

1Q15 Market Share (%)

HP

25.0

25.8

Dell

23.5

23.1

Lenovo

19.4

19.6

Acer

12.2

10.5

Others

19.9

21.0

Total

100.0

100.0

Gartner (June 2016)

Note: PC shipments include desk-based and mobile PCs.

WPG Americas, Inc. (WPGA), a subsidiary of WPG Holdings, Asia’s number one electronics distributor, was recently awarded the Fastest Growing Revenue Recognition Award by Micron Technology, Inc.

From left: Lorenzo Ponzanelli, Rich Davis, Mike Bokan, John Balzotti, Dana Slater, Don Brady, Ian Basey and Jeff Bader

From left: Lorenzo Ponzanelli, Rich Davis, Mike Bokan, John Balzotti, Dana Slater, Don Brady, Ian Basey and Jeff Bader

This award, which recognizes WPGA’s continued efforts to grow their presence as a frontrunner in the semiconductor industry, was accepted on June 7, 2016 at the Crown Plaza in San Jose, CA. Don Brady, Director of Americas Distribution for Micron, presented the award.

“We are excited to have been recognized by Micron for our hard work this past year and we look forward to strengthening our relationships in the future,” said Rich Davis, President of WPGA.

Accepting on behalf of WPGA were Davis, Ian Basey, VP of Marketing, John Balzotti, VP Americas Sales, and Dana Slater, Product Line Manager. Present from the Micron team were Lorenzo Ponzanelli, Sr. Director of Worldwide Sales, Mike Bokan, VP Worldwide OEM Sales and Jeff Bader, VP Embedded Business Unit.

Headquartered in San Jose, CA, WPG Americas Inc. is a member of WPG Holdings, a $14.9B worldwide distributor of semiconductors, passive, electro-mechanical and display products.

By Paula Doe, SEMI

The changing market for ICs means the end of business as usual for the greater semiconductor supply chain. Smarter use of data analytics looks like a key strategy to get new products more quickly into high yield production at improved margins.

Emerging IoT market drives change in manufacturing

The emerging IoT market for pervasive intelligence everywhere may be a volume driver for the industry, but it will also put tremendous pressure on prices that drive change in manufacturing. Pressure to keep ASPs of multichip connected devices below $1 to $5 for many IoT low-to-mid end applications, will drive more integration of the value chain, and more varied elements on the die. “The value chain must evolve to be more effective and efficient to meet the price and cost pressures for such IoT products and applications,” suggests Rajeev Rajan, VP of IoT, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, who will speak on the issue in a day-long forum on the future of smart manufacturing in the semiconductor supply chain at SEMICON West 2016 on July 14.

“It also means tighter and more complete integration of features on the die that enable differentiating capabilities at the semiconductor level, and also fewer, smaller devices that reduce the overall Bill of Materials (BOM), and result in more die per wafer.” He notes that at 22nm GLOBALFOUNDRIES is looking to enable an integrated connectivity solution instead of a separate die or external chip. Additional requirements for IoT are considerations for integrating security at the lower semiconductor/hardware layers, along with the typical higher layer middleware and software layers.

This drive for integration will also mean demand for new advanced packaging solutions that deliver smaller, thinner, and simpler form factors. The cost pressure also means than the next nodes will have to offer tangible power/performance/area/cost (PPAC) value, without being too disruptive a transition from the current reference flow. “Getting to volume yields faster will involve getting yield numbers earlier in the process, with increasing proof-points and planning iterations up front with customers, at times tied to specific use-cases and IoT market sub-segments,” he notes.

Rapid development of affordable data tools from other industries may help

Luckily, the wide deployment of affordable sensors and data analysis tools in other industries in other industries is developing solutions that may help the IC sector as well.  “A key trend is the “democratization” – enabling users to do very meaningful learning on data, using statistical techniques, without requiring a Ph.D. in statistics or mathematics,” notes Bill Jacobs, director, Advanced Analytics Product Management, Microsoft Corporation, another speaker in the program. “Rapid growth of statistics-oriented languages like R across industries is making it easier for manufacturers and equipment suppliers to capture, visualize and learn from data, and then build those learnings into dashboards for rapid deployment, or build them directly into automated applications and in some cases, machines themselves.”

Intel has reported using commercially available systems such as Cloudera, Aquafold, and Revolution Analytics (now part of Microsoft) to combine, store, analyze and display results from a wide variety of structured and unstructured manufacturing data. The system has been put to work to determine ball grid placement accuracy from machine learning from automatic comparison of thousands of images to select the any that deviate from the known-good pattern,  far more efficiently than human inspectors, and also to analyze tester parametrics to predict 90% of potential failures of the test interface unit before they happen.

“The IC industry may be ahead in the masses of data it gathers, but other industries are driving the methodology for easy management of the data,” he contends. “There’s a lot that can be leveraged from other industries to improve product quality, supply chain operations, and line up-time in the semiconductor industry.”

Demands for faster development of more complex devices require new approaches

As the cost of developing faster, smaller, lower power components gets ever higher, the dual sourcing strategies of automotive and other big IC users puts even more pressure on device makers to get the product right the first time. “There’s no longer time to learn with iterations to gradually improve the yield over time, now we need to figure out how to do this faster, as well as how to counter higher R&D costs on lower margins,” notes Sia Langrudi, Siemens VP Worldwide Strategy and Business Development,   who will also speak in the program.

The first steps are to recognize the poor visibility and traceability from design to manufacturing, and to put organizational discipline into place to remove barriers between silos. Then a company needs good baseline data, to be able to see improvement when it happens. “It’s rather like being an alcoholic, the first step is to recognize you have a problem,” says Langrudi. “People tell me they already have a quality management system, but they don’t. They have lots of different information systems, and unless they are capturing the information all in one place, the opportunity to use it is not there.”

Other speakers discussing these issues in the Smart Manufacturing Forum at SEMICON West July 14 include Amkor SVP Package Products Robert Lanzone, Applied Materials VP New Markets & Services Chris Moran, Intel VP IoT/GM Industrial Anthony Neal Graves, NextNine US Sales Manager Don Harroll, Optimal+ VP WW Marketing David Park, Qualcomm SVP Engineering Michael Campbell, Rudolph Technologies VP/GM Software Thomas Sonderman, and Samsung Sr Director, Engineering Development, Austin, Ben Eynon.

Learn more about the speakers at the SEMICON West 2016 session “Smart Manufacturing: The Key Opportunities and Challenges of the Next Generation of Manufacturing for the Electronics Value Chain.” To see all sessions in the Extended Supply Chain Forum, click here.

The SEMI High Tech U learning program commenced April 20-22 in Hsinchu, Taiwan. Co-hosted by SEMI, KLA-Tencor Taiwan, and National Tsing Hua University, the three-day event offered 40 high school students an in-depth interactive learning experience in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Since SEMI High Tech U began in 2001, it has hosted 190 career exploration programs in eight different countries with over 6,000 high school students attending. The High Tech U programs have received a tremendous response globally.

This year, Taiwan was a host country for the first time. Terry Tsao, president of SEMI Taiwan, said, “The goal of High Tech U is to help young people gain knowledge and develop interests in STEM before choosing their future academic pursuit. Not only did Taiwanese high school students have the opportunity to attend this international STEM immersion program, but they also interacted with industry volunteers who serve in the high-tech industry.” Through group activities and firsthand experience, students thoroughly explored technology, adding to their ability to understand their future career directions.

“In the U.S., KLA-Tencor has collaborated with SEMI to hold seven SEMI HTU (High Tech U) programs. The first-ever Taiwan course design, instructor training, and the local operations planning, were tailored to inspire Taiwanese students to have better understanding of their direction and passion towards the semiconductor industry and their future goals,” said Tom Wang, CEO of KLA-Tencor Corporation Taiwan. Many employees at KLA-Tencor Taiwan volunteered to be course instructors and advisors to share their professional experience at SEMI High Tech U. In addition to providing guided tours at KLA-Tencor’s learning and training center cleanroom, the volunteers also held mock interviews with the students.

Nyan-Hwa Tai, dean of Academic Affairs at National Tsing Hua University, said “Courses at SEMI High Tech U are designed to gain practical experience through a non-conventional approach, which coincides with the values of innovative exploration at National Tsing Hua University.”

In three days, the students did practical exercises, learning individually and in groups. Tsao pointed out that “During the three-day program, students demonstrated a high level of enthusiasm, confidence, creativity, and team spirit, which is commendable. This event is just the beginning; SEMI will strive to expand the High Tech U program in Taiwan and allow more students to have the opportunity to participate.”

Learn more about the SEMI Foundation and High Tech U here: www.semi.org/en/semi-foundation. For more information about SEMI, visit www.semi.org and follow SEMI on LinkedIn and Twitter.