SEMATECH Forms International SEMATECH
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 3/1/1998
The globalization of SEMATECH took a step forward with the official
formation of International SEMATECH, which will take over the work of the U.S.
semiconductor manufacturing technology R&D consortium's International 300 mm
Initiative (I300I) subsidiary, while adding responsibility for lithography infrastructure,
semiconductor industry standards and environmental, safety and health (ESH) issues.
There are 15 companies participating in International SEMATECH, which will officially begin operation on April 2 at the SEMATECH facility in Austin, Texas. The international participants, who were previously involved in I300I, are Hyundai Electronics Industries of South Korea, Philips Semiconductors of the Netherlands, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics of France and Italy, Siemens of Germany and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) of the Republic of China.
The American participants are the 10 members of SEMATECH: Advanced Micro Devices, Digital Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, IBM, Lucent Technologies, Motorola, National Semiconductor, Rockwell and Texas Instruments.
Semiconductor Equipment & Materials International (SEMI), the industry group representing suppliers of capital equipment and chipmaking materials, recently endorsed the formation of International SEMATECH. Although U.S. companies dominate the SEMI membership rolls, there are dozens of companies from Europe and Asia that belong to the trade group, which maintains offices in Brussels, Belgium; Hsinchu, Taiwan; Seoul, South Korea; and Moscow, Tokyo and Singapore, in addition to its four U.S. offices.
SEMATECH said International SEMATECH will have its own board of directors. The 10 members of the SEMATECH board of directors will also serve on the International SEMATECH board, along with the five representatives of Hyundai, Philips, SGS-Thomson, Siemens and TSMC. SEMATECH's annual operating budget will increase from $125 million to $160 million, all funded by dues paid by the members of the two organizations. SEMATECH originally received funding from the U.S. government through the Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but that funding ended last year, at SEMATECH's request. The members of SEMATECH increased their corporate dues on the first of this year to help make up the difference in the annual budget; SEMATECH is now a smaller organization, down more than 100 employees from two years ago.
Semiconductor International interviewed Mark Melliar-Smith, the president and CEO of SEMATECH, regarding the new International SEMATECH. Here are some excerpts from that interview:
SI: How does International SEMATECH differ from I300I?
MMS: I300I will be a division of International SEMATECH, which itself will be a subsidiary of SEMATECH. We're going to take nearly the same team that was involved in I300I and have additional programs. I300I will continue as it is today, as a division of International SEMATECH.
SI: The Japanese have traditionally not participated in either I300I or SEMATECH. Do you see that they might be more interested in participating in this new venture?
MMS: About three years ago my predecessor, Bill Spencer, floated the idea of interconsortia cooperation with the Japanese and, in particular, suggested they might like to join the U.S. companies on the 300 mm program, which eventually evolved to I300I. They declined to participate. They were planning their own 300 mm consortia, which ended up as SELETE. They wanted to have a common language with their suppliers.
This time, because we were very familiar working with our I300I team -- it was a solid team, we were comfortable with it -- we decided we would build on that foundation and did not invite the Japanese to join International SEMATECH, preferring to build it up on the existing base of SEMATECH and I300I members. However, I don't want people to mistake our intentions. This is not designed to line the rest of the world up against the Japanese. In fact, we have a number of quite effective interactions with the Japanese consortia: the creation of 300 mm standards we've done between I300I and a different organization called J300 in Japan. Then we went with a common position, to SEMI, which actually created the standard. In addition to that we have agreed on how to run joint demonstration programs with SELETE. If we can agree on a single piece of equipment and how it should be demonstrated, then it does save money by demonstrating it at one place rather than two different consortia.
SI: Six hundred seventy employees and assignees work for SEMATECH, with about 150 of those working for the new subsidiary. Do you see that changing over time? Do you see SEMATECH evolving more into that international organization, or do you see yourself staying mainly a U.S. organization with this smaller subsidiary that's international?
MMS: It's probably inappropriate for me to predict the future or pre-empt my board of directors who would make that decision. I think we'll watch how successful this International SEMATECH activity is and then base our decisions on that.
SI: What do you see as the major benefits of the International SEMATECH?
MMS: The semiconductor industry is really critical to a global economy and certainly the U.S. economy. We think that precompetitive research and cooperation is a cost-effective way for the industry as a whole, including the global membership, to tackle some of the significant technical challenges we face to stay on our manufacturing productivity curves. The essence of the industry has been our ability to make transistors for 25% less cost every year. We face big challenges. Next-generation post-optical lithography is a good example: the move to copper from aluminum, the move to low-k dielectrics from SiO2. These are some very non-incremental challenges we face, and we believe the work at SEMATECH and the work at I300I has clearly demonstrated the benefit of global cooperation. This is going to be good for the semiconductor industry.
We also believe this will be good for the U.S. equipment industry. I know there's been some concern that this will change SEMATECH's heritage of being concerned about the U.S. equipment industry. I don't believe that is the case at all. We're adding five additional equipment customers to our consortium. And if you look at their buying habits, particularly the Europeans and Taiwanese, they in many ways are parallel to what we're doing with the existing U.S. companies.
Finally, we think this is a good thing for our members. SEMATECH has proved to be a good investment for more than 10 years now. We think we know how to run a very effective consortia, and certainly we expect International SEMATECH to increase the benefit not only to the new members coming in, but to our existing members as well.
SI: Do you see it as a challenge for these (member) companies to define what's precompetitive and what's competitive in terms of research and manufacturing technology?
MMS: What you're alluding to here is one of the core competences that our member companies have developed over 10 years of cooperation. It didn't come instantly, and it didn't come easily either. Manufacturing obviously, ultimately, is a competitive challenge. However, there's a lot about manufacturing where cooperation can exceed the benefit from pure competition. Early tool development tends to be a specific item. It's not integrating a couple hundred tools into a full process flow. We don't do that at SEMATECH. We do unit processes on unit tools. That's the way we keep it from encroaching too much on what the member companies consider to be competitive. But over the past 10 years, what the member companies have found is that they can share more and more information and get more and more benefit, largely because our industry has been an industry where we've been mostly concerned, at least from a manufacturing standpoint, on growing the pie, growing our revenue, growing our production and reducing our costs by 25% a year. And if we continue to do that, then the whole industry will continue to expand. So while manufacturing is a competitive weapon, I won't deny that -- and we try to stay away from the most competitive parts of it -- the real competitive advantage that most of the semiconductor companies have is their product definition, their speed to market with those products and their marketing strategy. I think all of those are things that most member companies would agree are probably more important and a greater leverage to them than a 5% difference in manufacturing. Now, that's very important and they go after it, but they're willing to cooperate, especially in the front-end of manuacturing, because they all want to benefit from a 25% per year improvement in manufacturing costs.
SI: What do you see as the future of the fab that you have within SEMATECH? Do you see that still running as hard as it has been?
MMS: Absolutely. We have made very significant improvements in our fab capability here in Austin. We have significantly upgraded the capability of the technology at 200 mm, bringing in, for example, a Microscan III, a scanner which is really a state-of-the-art machine. In addition to that, we've now got a fully operational end-to-end copper/low-k interconnection line consisting of a dozen tools or more. We've done a lot to upgrade our technology at 200 mm. In addition to that, we have in place now a 300 mm line. It's not totally facilitated, but there's something like 30 pieces of 300 mm equipment on the floor being used for demonstrations. In the years I have been at SEMATECH I have been really pleased to see what has happened. We've had tremendous cooperation with the U.S. equipment industry to increase the capability of our fab facility at SEMATECH. We're looking for a win-win relationship with the equipment industry where it can provide us with a state-of-the-art tool and we can work together to get information out of it. That's really a big plus for us. I think the U.S. equipment industry has really stepped up to that with SEMATECH. And in exchange for that, we have been increasing our efforts to use our advanced wafer fab facility to provide wafers that the equipment industry can use to develop equipment. For example, if you are involved in doing copper CMP for damascene processing, it's really helpful if somebody can provide you with patterned copper wafers that you can then chem-mechanical polish and test out your equipment. I think there's a very symbiotic relationship between the equipment industry and SEMATECH, and a lot of it revolves around our fab facility.
