Tag Archives: letter-mems-top

The most expensive defect


December 18, 2014

Defects that aren’t detected inline cost fabs the most. 

By DAVID W. PRICE and DOUGLAS G. SUTHERLAND, KLA-Tencor, Milpitas, CA

Defect inspection tools can be expensive. But regardless of the cost of the inspection tool needed to find a defect, the fab is almost always better off financially if it can find and fix that defect inline versus at the end of line (e.g., electrical test and failure analysis). Here, we are referring to the term defect in a general sense—the same concepts also apply to metrology measurements.

The third fundamental truth of process control for the semiconductor IC industry is:

The most expensive defect is the one that wasn’t detected inline.

FIGURE 1A (top) shows an imaginary SPC chart for a factory experiencing a baseline shift in defectivity (an excursion) beginning at Lot #300. FIGURE 1B (bottom) shows the same scenario except the fab has an effective inline monitor at the point of the excursion. In this case, the excursion is quickly identified and the offending process tool is taken offline for process tuning or maintenance. The excursion is contained and relatively few lots are impacted by the resulting yield loss.

Defects 1a

FIGURE 1. It is always better to find and fix problems inline versus at the end of line. 1a. Problem identification and correction does not occur until bad wafers reach end-of-line test. 1b. Problem identification and correction occurs immediately.

FIGURE 1. It is always better to find and fix problems inline versus at the end of line. 1a. Problem identification and correction does not occur until bad wafers reach end-of-line test. 1b. Problem identification and correction occurs immediately.

The difference between these two scenarios is that in the top chart, the fab is unable to detect the excursion inline so the baseline shift continues unabated until the first affected lots hit end of line test. For a foundry process with a 60-day cycle time, this delay could easily exceed 20 days.

In our experience working with IC manufacturers, the majority of financial impact does not come from large excursions that cause significant yield loss to every affected wafer—those problems are usually identified and rectified very early on. Rather, the largest losses usually come from small excursions that are difficult to detect. They cause relatively low levels of yield loss but persist for prolonged periods of time. It is not uncommon to see thousands or even tens of thousands of wafers exposed to these low level excursions.

The culprit is nearly always a process control capability issue that can be traced back to one or more possible problems. The following list is not meant to be exhaustive, but is instead, representative of the most common causes:

Defects 2

FIGURE 2. Cost vs. mean time to detection (MTTD) of finding a defect inline. The curves are drawn for 4 different wafer costs in a fab with 100k WSPM. It is assumed that the excursion takes place at a single step in the process and happens once per year to each of the process tools at that step. The yield loss is assumed to be 20% during the excursion.

  • Insufficient number of inspection points to allow effective isolation of the defect source.
  • Failing to use a sensitive enough inspection tool or recipe (pixel size is too large, wrong wavelength,
  • etc.)
  • Inspection area of wafer is too low.
  • Review sample size is too small.

Often, the original inspection strategy was carefully designed, but as time passed, changes were made to reduce costs. As new sources of noise are introduced in the SPC chart, the fab becomes less sensitive to small excursions.

FIGURE 2 shows the economic impact to the fab for the two scenarios shown by the SPC chart in FIGURE 1. Imagine an excursion which results in a net 25 percent yield loss (e.g., one out of four wafers must be scrapped). Finding that excursion at end-of-line (+30 days) versus inline (greater than one day) would amount to a staggering $21 million loss per occurrence for an average size run rate of 25k wafer starts per month. Given that this value only repre- sents the cost of re-manufacturing the scrapped wafers it could actually be a conservative estimate. The true cost could easily be double that amount for a fab that is running at the limit of their capacity since it would directly impact revenue.

Even if the situation requires the use of a relatively expensive inspection tool to find, monitor and resolve the problem, it is nearly always in the factory’s best interest to do so. One of the implications of this truth is that if an important defect type can only be detected by a certain inspection tool, then that inspection tool is almost always the most cost-effective solution for that layer. Rather than modifying process control strategies to save costs, it is nearly always in the factory’s best interest to maintain capable, inline process control strategies that prevent the financial impact of ‘the most expensive defect.’

Author’s Note: This is the third in a series of 10 installments that explore fundamental truths about process control—defect inspection and metrology—for the semiconductor industry. Each article introduces one of the 10 fundamental truths and highlights their implications.

Read more Process Watch:

Process Watch: Fab managers don’t like surprises

Process Watch: The 10 fundamental truths of process control for the semiconductor IC industry

Process Watch: Exploring the dark side

“The Dangerous Disappearing Defect,” “Skewing the Defect Pareto,” “Bigger and Better Wafers,” “Taming the Overlay Beast,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Reticle,” “Breaking Parametric Correlation,” “Cycle Time’s Paradoxical Relationship to Yield,” and “The Gleam of Well-Polished Sapphire.”

 

What’s next for MEMS?


December 16, 2014

By Paula Doe, SEMI

The proliferation of sensors into high volume consumer markets, and into the emerging Internet of Things, is driving the MEMS market to maturity, with a developed ecosystem to ease use and grow applications. But it is also bringing plenty of demands for new technologies, and changes in how companies will compete.

While the IoT may be all about sensors, it is not necessarily a bonanza for most traditional MEMS sensor makers. “The surprising winner turns to be optical MEMS for optical cross connect for the data center, where big growth is coming,” said Jérémie Bouchaud, IHS Director and Sr. Principal Analyst, MEMS & Sensors, at the recent MEMS Industry Group (MIG) “MEMS Executive Congress” held in Scottsdale, Arizona from November 5-7.

The market for wearables will also see fast growth for the next five years, largely for smart watches, driving demand for motion sensors, health sensors, sensor hubs and software –but even in 2019 the market for sensors in wearables will remain <5% the size of the phone/tablet market, IHS predicts.  The greater IoT market may reach billions of other connected devices in the next decade, but sensor demand will be very fragmented and very commoditized. Smart homes may use 20 million sensors in 2018, but many other industrial applications will probably each use only 100,000 to 2-3 million sensors a year, Bouchaud noted.

And most of this sensor market will be non-MEMS sensors, some mature and some emerging, including light sensors, fingerprint sensors, pulse sensors, gas sensors, and thermal sensors, all requiring different and varied manufacturing technologies.  Much of the new sensor demand from automotive will be also be for non-MEMS radar and cameras, though they will also add MEMS for higher performance gyros, lidar and microbolometers, according to IHS. Expect major MEMS makers to diversify into more of these other types of sensors.

MEMS Exec Bouchaud - IHS - MIG US 2014_Page_22_Resized

Yole Développement CEO Jean Christophe Eloy looked at how the value in the IoT would develop.  While the emerging IoT market is initially primarily a hardware market, with hardware sales climbing healthily for the next five years or so, it will quickly become primarily a software and services market.  In five to six years hardware sales will level off, and the majority of the value will shift to data processing and value added services.  This information service market will continue to soar, to account for 75% of the $400 Billion IoT market by 2024.

MEMS Exec JC Eloy_Market Panel_MIG 2014 V1_Page_28_Resized

Re-thinking the business models?

The IoT will bring big changes to the electronics industry, from new technologies to new business models, and new leaders, suggested George Liu, TSMC Director of Corporate Development.  He of course also argued that the high volume and low costs required for connected objects would drive sensor production to high volume foundries, and drive more integration with CMOS for smart distributed processing at CMOS makers.

Liu projected these changes would mean a new set of companies would come out on top. Few leading system makers managed to successfully transition from the PC era to the mobile handset era, or from the mobile handset era to the smart phone era, as both the key technologies and the winning business models changed, and chip makers faced disruption as well. “For one thing, the business model changed from making everything in house to making nothing,” he noted. “The challenge is to focus on where one is most efficient.”

“The odds of Apple or Google being the dominant players in the next paradigm is zero,” concurred Chris Wasden, Executive Director, Sorenson Center for Discovery and Innovation at the University of Utah.

Lots of other things will have to change to enable the IoT as well. Liu projected that devices will need to operate at near threshold or even sub-threshold voltages, with “thinner” processing overhead, while the integration of more different functions will redefine the system-in-a-chip. Smaller and lower cost devices will require new materials and new architectures, new types of heterogenous integration and wafer-level packaging, and an ecosystem of standard open platforms to ease development. TSMC’s own MEMS development kit has layout rules, but not yet behaviorial rules, always the more challenging issue for these mechanical structures. “That’s the next big thing for us,” he asserted. “These huge gaps mean huge opportunities.”

IDMs and systems companies still likely to dominate                     

Still, the wide variety, and sometimes tricky mechanics and low volumes, of many MEMS devices have been a challenge for the volume foundries.  The fabless MEMS model has seen only limited success so far and is unlikely to see much in the next decade either, countered Jean Christophe Eloy, CEO of Yole Développement, who pointed out that some 75% of the MEMS business is dominated by the four big IDMs who can drive costs down with volumes and diversified product lines. To date, only two fabless companies—InvenSense and Knowles—are among the top 30 MEMS suppliers.

Most of the rest of the top 30 are system makers with their own fabs, making their own MEMS devices to enable higher value system products of their own, which is likely to continue to remain a successful approach, as the opportunities for adding value increasingly come from software, processers, and systems.  “MEMS value has always been at the system level,” noted Eloy.

GE’s recent introduction of an improved MEMS RF switch to significantly reduce the size and cost of its MRI systems is one compelling example, with the potential of the little MEMS component to greatly extend the use of this high-contrast soft-tissue imaging technology.  Though the company sold off its general advanced sensors unit last year to connector maker Amphenol Corp., it is still making its unique RF switch using a special alloy in house in small volumes as a key enabler of its high value MRI systems. These imagers work by aligning the spin of hydrogen nuclei with a strong magnet, tipping them off axis with a strong RF pulse from an antenna, then measuring how they snap back into alignment with lots of localized antennas with low power RF switches close to the body.  “We’re now launching a new receive chain using MEMS RF switches,” reported Tim Nustad, GM and CTO, Global Magnetic Resonance, GE Healthcare. “Later we can see a flexible, light weight MRI blanket.”

Opportunity for smaller, lower power, lower cost technologies

So far, MEMS makers have driven down the cost of devices by continually shrinking the size of the die.  But that may be about to change, as the mechanical moving structures have about reached the limit of how much smaller they can get and still produce the needed quality signal.  That’s opening the door for a new generation of devices using different sensing structures and different manufacturing processes.  For inertial sensors, options include bulk acoustic wave sensing from Qualtre, piezoresistive nanowires from Tronics and CEA/Leti, and even extrapolating gyroscope-like data with software from accelerometers and magnetometers. MCube’s virtual gyro with this approach, now in production with some design wins, claims to save 80% of the power and 50% of the cost of a conventional MEMS gyro.

Piezoelectric sensing, often with PZT films, is also drawing attention, with products in development  for timing devices and microphones. Sand9 claims lower noise and lower power for its piezoelectric MEMS timing, now starting volume manufacturing for Intel and others for shipments in 1Q15.  It has also recently received a patent for piezo microphone, while startup Vesper (formerly known as Baker-Calling and then Sonify) also reports working with a major customer for its piezoelectric MEMS microphone.

More open platforms ease development of new applications of established devices

The maturing ecosystem of open development platforms across the value chain is helping to ease commercialization of new applications. The two latest developments in this infrastructure are a standard interface to connect all kinds of different sensors to the controller, and an open library of basic sensor processing software. The MIPI Alliance brought together major users and suppliers—ranging across STMicroelectronics and InvenSense, to AMD and Intel, to Broadcom and Qualcomm, to Cadence and Mentor Graphics—to agree on an interface specification to make it easier for system designers to connect and manage a wide range of sensors from multiple suppliers while minimizing power consumption of the microcontroller.  Meanwhile, sensor makers and researchers are making a selection of baseline algorithms available for open use to ease development of new products.  Offerings include Freescale’s inertial sensor fusion and PNI Sensors’ heart rate monitoring algorithms, along with other contributions from Analog Devices, Kionix, NIST, UC Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon to start. The material will be available through the MIG website.

Plenty of companies have also introduced their own individual platforms to ease customer development tasks as well, ranging from MEMS foundries’ inertial sensor manufacturing platforms to processor makers’ development boards and kits. Recently STMicroelectronics also adding its sensor fusion and other software blocks to its development platform.

KegData is one example of a company making use of these platforms to enable development of a solution for a niche problem – an automated system for telling pub owners how much beer is left in their kegs, using a Freescale pressure sensor and development tools. Currently the only way to know when a beer keg is empty is to go lift and weigh or shake it, a problem for efficiently managing expensive refrigerated inventory.  Adding a pressure sensor in the coupler on top of the keg allows the height of the beer to be measured by the differential pressure between the liquid and the gas above it. The sensor then sends the information to a hub controller that communicates with the internet, letting the pub manager know to order more, or even automatically placing the order directly with the distributor.  The startup’s business model is to give the system to distributors for free, but sell them the service of automating inventory management for their customers, saving them the significant expense of sending drivers around to shake the kegs and take pre-orders.

More broadly, MEMS microphones are poised to continue to find a wide range of new applications. IHS’ Bouchaud  pointed out that cars will soon each be using 12-14 MEMS microphone units, to listen for changes in different conditions, while home security applications will use them to detect  security breaches from unusual patterns of sounds, from people in the house to dogs barking. Startup MoboSens says it converts its chemical water quality data into audio signals to feed it into the phone’s mic port for better quality.

Opportunities still for new types of MEMS devices

Growth will also continue to come from new MEMS devices that find additional ways to replace conventional mechanical parts with silicon. Eloy noted that MEMS autofocus units may finally be the next breakout device, as they have started shipping in the last few weeks, and aim at shipping for products in 2015.  MEMS microspeakers are also making progress and could come soon. But ramping new devices to the high volumes demanded by consumer markets is particularly challenging. “The only way to enter the market is with new technology, but high volume consumer markets make entry very hard for new devices,” he said. “The market is saturated, wins depend on production costs, and not everyone can keep up…. The last significant new device was the MEMS microphone, and that was ten years ago.”

But innovative new MEMS technologies also continue to be developed for initial applications in higher margin industrial and biomedical fields. One interesting platform is the MEMS spectrometer from VTT Technical Research Center of Finland.  This robust tunable interferometer essentially consists of an adjustable air gap between two mirrors, made of alternating ALD or LPCVD bands of materials with different defraction indexes, explained Anna Rissanen, VTT research team leader for MOEMS and bioMEMS instruments. The structure can be tuned by different voltages to filter particular bands of light, while a single-point detector, instead of the usual array, enables very small and low cost spectrometers or hyper spectral cameras. VTT spinout Spectral Engines is commercializing near-IR and mid-IR sensors aimed at detecting moisture, hydrocarbons and gases in industrial applications.  Other programs have developed sensors for environmental analysis by flyover by nano satellites and UAVs, sensors for monitoring fuel quality to optimize energy use and prevent engine damage, and sensors that can diagnose melanoma from a scan of the skin.

Keep up with these changing manufacturing technology demands at upcoming MEMS events at SEMICON China 2015, SEMICON Russia 2015, SEMICON West 2015, and at the new European MEMS Summit planned for Milan in September.

3D TSV begins


December 10, 2014

3D TSV integration has already been adopted in MEMS and CMOS Image Sensors for consumer applications (Source: 3DIC & 2.5D TSV Interconnect for Advanced Packaging Business Update report). Device makers such as Sony, Toshiba, Omnivision, Samsung, Bosch Sensortec, STMicroelectronics and mCube … have all brought devices to the market that integrate 3D TSV technology.

“TSV’s added- value is important: increased performance and functionality, more compact devices, more efficient utilization of the silicon space,” explained Yole Développement (Yole). Moreover, even if 3D TSV process steps are adding cost at the device manufacturing level, these technologies enable cost- saving in other parts of the supply chain.

tsv

“No more doubts about adoption of 3D TSV platform across a wider range of applications: all key players added 3D TSV into their roadmaps, engineering samples have already started to ship and preparation is on-going for entering volume manufacturing,” said Rozalia Beica, CTO & Business Director, Advanced Packaging and Semiconductor Manufacturing at Yole. This year, the industry witnessed several memory product announcements for high-end applications, with transfer to volume production planned in the near future.

“Driven by the demand to further increase in performance, 2015 will be the year for the implementation of 3D TSV technology in high volume production,” explains Rozalia.

The market research and strategy consulting company, Yole and its advanced packaging team, are closely studying and monitoring the industry’s activities in this field. The latest results can be found in Yole’s new 3DIC & 2.5D Business Update Report published this year.

Yole’s vision on further 3D TSV technology adoption will be presented during the European 3D TSV Summit 2015 in Grenoble. The company is partnering with SEMI to support the European TSV Summit, which will take place in Grenoble, France on January 19 to 21, 2015. The European 3D TSV Summit is organized by SEMI Europe. To meet Yole’s experts, discover the detailed program and register, click European 3D TSV Summit 2015.

Also, at the European 3D TSV Summit, Jean-Christophe Eloy, President & CEO, Yole will moderate the panel discussion, “From TSV Technology to Final Products – What is the Business for 3D Smart Systems?” taking place on Tuesday 20, at 5:20 PM. Jean-Christophe will highlight 3D TSV market trends and technology challenges, especially its integration for 3D smart systems application. He will welcome the following panelists: Ron Huemoeller, Senior VP Advanced Product / Platform Development, AMKOR – Martin Schrems, VP of R&D, ams AG – Bryan Black, Senior Fellow, AMD – Mustafa Badaroglu, Senior Program Manager, Qualcomm.

In parallel, Rozalia Beica will be part of the Market Briefing Symposium, on Monday 19. Her presentation is entitled: “From Development to Manufacturing: An Overview of Industry’s 3D Packaging Activities”.

“We are excited to have a group of highly qualified market experts, such as Yole Développement, joining us this year for the European 3D TSV Summit,” stated Anne-Marie Dutron, Director of SEMI Europe’s Grenoble office. “To highlight the adoption of 3D TSV technology in several market applications and to answer the demand from our members, we have given the business aspects of the 3D TSV industry more importance in this 2015 edition.”

The European 3D TSV Summit final program is now available.

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. and Spansion, Inc. this week announced a definitive agreement to merge in an all-stock, tax-free transaction valued at approximately $4 billion. The post-merger company will generate more than $2 billion in revenue annually.

“This merger represents the combination of two smart, profitable, passionately entrepreneurial companies that are No. 1 in their respective memory markets and have successfully diversified into embedded processing,” said Rodgers, Cypress’s founding president and CEO. “Our combined company will be a leading provider of embedded MCUs and specialized memories. We will also have extraordinary opportunities for EPS accretion due to the synergy in virtually every area of our enterprises.”

Under the terms of the agreement, Spansion shareholders will receive 2.457 Cypress shares for each Spansion share they own. The shareholders of each company will own approximately 50 percent of the post-merger company. The company will have an eight-person board of directors consisting of four Cypress directors, including T.J. Rodgers and Eric Benhamou, and four Spansion directors, including John Kispert and Ray Bingham, the Spansion chairman, who will serve as the non-executive chairman of the combined company, which will be headquartered in San Jose, California and called Cypress Semiconductor Corporation.

The merger is expected to achieve more than $135 million in cost synergies on an annualized basis within three years and to be accretive to non-GAAP earnings within the first full year after the transaction closes. The combined company will continue to pay $0.11per share in quarterly dividends to shareholders.

“Bringing together these high-performing organizations creates operating efficiencies and economies of scale, and will deliver maximum value for our shareholders, new opportunities for employees and an improved experience for our customers,” said John Kispert, CEO of Spansion. “With unparalleled expertise, global reach in markets like Japan and market-leading products for automotive, IoT, industrial and communications markets, the new company is well positioned to deliver best-of-breed solutions and execute on our long-term vision of adding value through embedded system-on-chip solutions.”

The closing of the transaction is subject to customary conditions, including approval by Cypress and Spansion stockholders and review by regulators in the U.S., Germany and China. The transaction has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies. Cypress and Spansion expect the deal to close in the first half of 2015.

Jefferies LLC and Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC served as financial advisors and Fenwick & West and Latham & Watkins acted as legal counsel to Spansion. Qatalyst Partners acted as financial advisor and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal counsel to Cypress.

Slideshow: IEDM 2014 Preview


November 26, 2014

This year, the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) celebrates 60 years of reporting technological breakthroughs in the areas of semiconductor and electronic device technology, design, manufacturing, physics, and modeling. The conference scope not only encompasses devices in silicon, compound and organic semiconductors, but also in emerging material systems. In 2014 there is an increased emphasis on circuit and process technology interaction, energy harvesting, bio-snesors and bioMEMS, power devices, magnetics and spintronics, two dimensional electronics and devices for non-Boolean computing.

Solid State Technology will be reporting insights from bloggers and industry partners during the conference, and this slideshow provides an advance look at some of the most newsworthy topics and papers to be presented at the annual meeting, to be held at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square Hotel from December 15-17, 2014.

Click here to launch slideshow. 

Bay Bridge, San Francisco at dusk

 

Related news and blogs: 

Intel and IBM to lay out 14nm FinFET strategies on competing substrates at IEDM 2014

Slideshow: IEDM 2013 Highlights

Combo sensors continue their growth in a market expected to reach US$ 1.4 billion in 2019 overcoming discrete sensors. Yole Développement (Yole), the market research and strategy consulting company, proposes a deep analysis of the inertial combos for consumer application, with its new report, “6&9 Axis Sensors Consumer Inertial Combos”. According to Yole’s analysis, cellphones and tablets still drive the market but wearables will soon take their place in the landscape.

From the players’ side, Yole’s analysts announced: “The ‘big 4′ companies in inertial MEMS share 75% of the consumer inertial combos market.” They saw that STMicroelectronics (STM) lost high-end smartphone share; in parallel, a strong challenge came from InvenSense and Bosch Sensortec, who both, won Apple’s business.

STM is still the global leader in the inertial consumer sensor market with 40 percent market share. InvenSense and Bosch Sensortec hardly compete with it today. InvenSense grew strongly, reaching more than 12 percent, going ahead of Bosch in the inertial market.

“The ‘big 4,’ including AKM, are preparing for the future, with InvenSense holding an advantage as it seems to be ahead in the competition on 9-axis sensors, which are found in a large numbers of products in development, including Google Glass,” said Guillaume Girardin, Technology & Market Analyst, MEMS & Sensors at Yole Développement. “Prices are still dropping sharply, with 6-axis IMUs sold to some large volume customers at less than $1 in 2013,” he added.

To stay in the race, leaders are going to introduce technical innovations: monolithic integration of 6-axis IMUs into 9-axis IMUs, TSVs, chip scale packaging, and active capping.

Current challengers and newcomers are eyeing this combo opportunity and expect to take market share, even though the supply chain is consolidating. Kionix, Freescale, Alps Electric, Fairchild, Maxim and more than 10 other companies are targeting this market space, but the leaders are well established and competition is hard.

New business models are developing and more fabless companies are likely to be involved in the combo market. Details on newcomer technologies and roadmaps are provided in the report.

The combo sensor market is estimated at US$420 million in 2013, US$585 million in 2014, growing to US$1.4 billion in 2019. This represents 28% of the global inertial consumer market in 2014, and will grow to almost 60 percent by 2019. “While smartphones and tablets are still driving volume increases and adoption of combos, the picture should be different in 2019,” said Dr Eric Mounier, Senior Analyst, MEMS devices & Technologies at Yole. “Combo sensors will take a significant portion of total market share, but opportunities will remain for discrete sensors, from accelerometers used in basic activity trackers to gyroscopes for camera module stabilization,” he added.

2012_2019market_consumerdiscrete_and_inertial_393x288

Nine of the Top 20 Semiconductor Suppliers are Forecast to Register Double-Digit Growth in 2014

Later this month, IC Insights’ November Update to The 2014 McClean Report will show a forecast ranking of the 2014 top 25 semiconductor suppliers with the companies’ sales broken down on a quarterly basis.  A preview of the forecast for the top 20 companies’ total 2014 sales results is presented in Figure 1.  The top 20 worldwide semiconductor (IC and O S D—optoelectronic, sensor, and discrete) sales ranking for 2014 includes eight suppliers headquartered in the U.S., three in Japan, three in Europe, three in Taiwan, two in South Korea, and one in Singapore, a relatively broad representation of geographic regions.

This year’s top-20 ranking includes two pure-play foundries (TSMC and UMC) and six fabless companies.  Pure-play IC foundry GlobalFoundries is forecast to be replaced in this year’s top 20 ranking by fabless IC supplier Nvidia.  It is interesting to note that the top four semiconductor suppliers all have different business models.  Intel is essentially a pure-play IDM, Samsung a vertically integrated IC supplier, TSMC a pure-play foundry, and Qualcomm a fabless company.

IC foundries are included in the top 20 ranking because IC Insights has always viewed the ranking as a top supplier list, not as a marketshare ranking, and realizes that in some cases semiconductor sales are double counted.  With many of IC Insights’ clients being vendors to the semiconductor industry (supplying equipment, chemicals, gases, etc.), excluding large IC manufacturers like the foundries would leave significant “holes” in the list of top semiconductor suppliers.  Foundries and fabless companies are clearly identified in Figure 1.  In the April Update to The McClean Report, marketshare rankings of IC suppliers by product type were presented and foundries were excluded from these listings.

As shown, it is expected to require total semiconductor sales of over $4.2 billion to make the 2014 top 20 ranking. In total, the top 20 semiconductor companies’ sales are forecast to increase by 9 percent this year as compared to 2013. However, when excluding the two pure-play foundries (TSMC and UMC) from the ranking, the top “18” semiconductor companies’ sales are forecast to increase by 8 percent this year, the same rate as IC Insights’ current forecast for total 2014 worldwide semiconductor market growth.

 

Fig. 1

Outside of the top six spots, there are numerous changes expected within the 2014 top-20 semiconductor supplier ranking.  In fact, of the 14 companies ranked 7th through 20th, 10 of them are forecast to change positions in 2014 as compared with 2013 (with NXP expected to jump up two spots).

More details on the forecasted 2014 top 25 semiconductor suppliers will be provided in the November Update to The McClean Report.

Propelled by the race between Apple and Samsung to enhance their mobile products with cutting-edge sensor technology, the market for sensors in cellphones and tablets is set to nearly triple from 2012 through 2018, according to IHS Technology.

Worldwide market revenue for sensors used in mobile handsets and media tablets will rise to $6.5 billion in 2018, up from $2.3 billion in 2012, as presented in the figure below. The fastest-expanding portion of the mobile sensor segment will be emerging devices, whose revenue will surge to $2.3 billion in 2018, up from just $24 million in 2012. In 2013, this segment posted dramatic growth, with revenue rising to more than $500 million.

2014-10-21_Sensors

“The next wave of sensor technology in smartphones and tablets has arrived,” said Marwan Boustany, IHS senior analyst for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and sensors. “Led by Apple and Samsung, the mobile market is moving beyond simply integrating established devices like motion sensors and now is including next-generation features like fingerprint and environment/health sensors. Adoption of these newer devices will drive the expansion of the mobile sensor device market in the coming years.”

Established sensors in mobile devices include motion sensors, light sensors and MEMS microphones. Emerging sensors consist of new devices including fingerprint, optical pulse, humidity, gas, ultraviolet (UV) and thermal imaging.

Information in this media release is contained in the new IHS Technology report entitled Emerging Sensors in Handsets & Tablets Report – 2014 from the Semiconductors & Components service.

Heightened sensors

Apple initiated the market for fingerprint sensors in mobile devices with the release of the iPhone 5s in 2013.

“Fingerprint sensors have arrived in force. IHS forecasts that shipments of fingerprint-enabled devices will reach 1.4 billion units in 2020,” Boustany said. “This is more than four times the 317 million units expected to be shipped by the end of 2014.”

The fingerprint sensor market is beginning to gain traction at other companies outside of Apple. New devices with fingerprint sensors include Samsung’s flagship model—the Galaxy S5—and Huawei’s top-of-the-line smartphone, the Ascend Mate 7, both of which began shipping in 2014.

For its part, Samsung has pioneered the deployment of other devices, including environmental and health sensors in the flagship models introduced by the company during the last 18 months. Samsung rolled out a humidity sensor in the Galaxy S4, a pulse sensor in the Galaxy S5 and a UV sensor in the Note 4.

Asian sensation

Fingerprint sensors play a key role in mobile payment services, providing authentication for systems like Apple Pay. Other banks and financial institutions, including Visa, MasterCard and PayPal are also working to support mobile payments and biometric authentication.

“This fingerprint market has all its requirements for success converging at the right time,” Boustany said.

Mobile payment services are expected to gain popularity not just in Europe and North America, but also in Asia.

With the increasing demand for sensor technology in Asia, IHS expects Chinese smartphone original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to be the next driver for a new generation of sensors.

Humidity sensors have been used in Chinese handsets since 2011. In the future, air-quality sensors will experience growing usage in China.

The first gas sensors have just been designed in by Chinese smartphone OEMs. IHS expects these phones will enter the market during the first half of 2015. There is also a specific demand for sensors that can detect particle pollution in large Chinese cities such as Beijing or Shanghai.

Extrasensory perception

In terms of revenue, fingerprint sensors now dominate the mobile market, followed by optical pulse sensors, humidity and UV sensors. IHS anticipates gas sensors will join the fray in 2015 and thermal imagers will arrive during the 2018 time period.

Thermal imagers using microbolometer sensors emerged from the technology of forward-looking infrared (FLIR) systems in 2014 as accessories for the iPhone 5s. However, it will take a few more years before these sensors decline enough in pricing to be embedded in smartphones.

IHS predicts that Samsung will adopt gas/chemical sensors in the Note 6 that will be introduced in 2016. This is because gas/chemical sensor technology will have matured and use cases will be more clearly defined by then.

Some sensors that have appeared in smartphones are likely to migrate to wearables, which in some cases are better platforms for health or environmental sensors.

SiTime Corporation, a MEMS and analog semiconductor company, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement under which MegaChips Corporation, a top 25 fabless semiconductor company based in Japan, will acquire SiTime for $200 million in cash. This transaction combines two complementary fabless semiconductor companies that provide solutions for the growing wearables, mobile and Internet of Things markets.

“SiTime’s founders, Markus Lutz and Dr. Aaron Partridge, started the company with a vision of developing game-changing MEMS and analog technology to revolutionize the $5 billion timing industry,” said Rajesh Vashist, CEO of SiTime. “Through innovation, passion and focus, we’ve successfully delivered on this vision. Today, SiTime is the overwhelming leader – we have 1000 customers, 250 million units shipped, major design wins in all electronics segments, and a roadmap that extends SiTime’s MEMS technology to all timing markets.”

“Every SiTime employee is excited to be part of MegaChips as we share a common entrepreneurial culture,” continued Vashist. “MegaChips’ financial strength and scale, with SiTime’s innovation and passion, will rapidly accelerate the adoption of MEMS timing solutions.”

While the world of electronics has delivered many innovations, the clock function, which is the heartbeat in all electronics, still uses 75-year-old quartz technology. SiTime’s MEMS timing solutions replace dated quartz products in the telecom, networking, computing, storage and consumer markets, with the benefits of higher performance, smaller size, and lower power and cost.

“MegaChips has an aggressive growth strategy with a vision to become one of the top ten fabless semiconductor companies through both organic growth and strategic acquisitions,” said Akira Takata, President and CEO of MegaChips Corporation. “MEMS components are fuelling the growth of the semiconductor industry. Through the acquisition of SiTime, MegaChips becomes a leader in MEMS. SiTime will help us expand our portfolio and diversify our customer base. SiTime technology is the perfect match for MegaChips’ solutions that target Wearables, Mobile and IoT markets such as “frizz”, our ultra-low-power smart phone Sensor Hub LSI and BlueChip Wireless, a sub-GHz RF LSI.”

“As a founding investor in SiTime, Bosch recognized early on the tremendous vision and innovation behind SiTime’s approach to MEMS timing,” said Dr. Volkmar Denner, Chairman, Board of Management of Robert Bosch GmbH. “We have closely followed their success from a Silicon Valley startup to a revenue-generating company that sells to some of the world’s largest electronics companies. We are pleased that MegaChips is acquiring SiTime and we expect a bright future for the combined companies.”

“We are delighted by this merger. MegaChips and SiTime are very complementary companies with similar innovative and entrepreneurial cultures, and a unified vision that can transform the electronics industry,” said Joe Horowitz, Managing General Partner at Jafco Ventures and a SiTime Board Member. “By leveraging SiTime’s proprietary technologies and highly differentiated products, I have no doubt this combination is just at its opening act with a great future ahead.”

“Over the past ten years, SiTime has built an extraordinary technology platform and a family of products that is in high demand at leading customers,” said Brooke Seawell, a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates and a founding investor and Board Member at SiTime. “With MegaChips’ operational and global scale, SiTime’s future is bright. The combined company will accelerate the adoption of MEMS timing solutions and will become a leading supplier to the electronics industry.”

Upon closing, scheduled for November 2014 pending regulatory approvals and customary closing conditions, SiTime will retain its name and operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of MegaChips. During this transaction, Needham & Company, LLC served as the exclusive financial advisor to SiTime.

MegaChips Corporation was established in 1990 as a fabless company dedicated to ASICs and system LSIs with the goal of integrating LSIs and systems knowledge and solutions.

STMicroelectronics announced it has shipped five billion MEMS sensors.

Beyond gaming systems, smartphones, tablets, navigation systems, and other widely adopted applications, ST’s sensors have also been used in thousands of other useful, fun, and valuable applications including weather stations, bicycle helmets, smart and sport watches, and other sporting goods as well as a host of automotive and Internet-of-Things products.

In addition, engineers have designed ST sensors into an amazing range of applications, including physiotherapy monitoring devices that monitor and help correct exercise movements; input devices that perform complex gesture recognition, including signature detection; safety products that prevent runaway child strollers and baby carriages; and snake-like robots for subaqueous environments, in design contests held around the world.

“The excitement around the Internet of Things and wearable applications combines with the added value of sensors and micro-actuators to create an ever-expanding number of applications that will drive this market’s continued strong growth,” said Jérémie Bouchaud, director and senior principal analyst for MEMS and Sensors at IHS Inc., an independent provider of business information and analytics. “ST’s broad range of sensors and micro-actuators clearly positions it as the company with the most comprehensive portfolio.”

“We have barely scratched the surface of the valuable role sensors and micro-actuators will play in improving the quality of our lives at home, at work and at play by making us safer and products easier to use,” said Benedetto Vigna, ST Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Analog, MEMS & Sensors Group. “With the industry’s most diverse portfolio ideally suited to the most dynamic industries, we are the only company that can continue to enable wave after wave of innovation in our homes, cars, and workplace, changing everyone’s life for the better.”

With almost 1000 MEMS-related patent families and close customer relationships with many of the markets’ top companies, ST is at the forefront of MEMS technology development.