David Lammers

When Is No Really a No?
October 23, 2008

An executive at a major IC manufacturer likes to tell the story about a meeting in 1996 to discuss 300 mm wafers. One after another, CEOs of the major equipment companies said that they wanted nothing to do with 300 mm equipment, that they had no plans for 300 mm R&D. “I’m out of it,” they said, one after another. The next morning, the executive took a series of phone calls from the same set of CEOs, who told him, “What I said yesterday was just our public position. I want you to know that we want to work with you on 300 mm equipment.”

The executive believes the same kind of “melodrama” is going on now. All of the major equipment companies have 450 mm R&D programs going on, he said. The companies making automation equipment, wafer carriers, and the like, are either participating in the Interoperability Test Bed, now underway by the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) in Austin, or are working at a similar automation test bed at a Murato Corp. facility in Japan.

At the ISMI Symposium on Manufacturing Effectiveness in Austin, others took a much different view of things. One source said he had canvassed his friends in the equipment industry who said they believed the willingness to do 450 mm tool development is declining. “It’s gotten less likely than at West. The resistance is getting higher.” The economy is much worse, and a quick scan of the headlines shows major equipment companies laying people off and struggling to make any gross profit.

Another source said he believes Applied Materials has a 450 mm development program going, initially aimed at a PVD tool. Another said a friend at a company he deals with has seen an ASML exposure tool rigged up with a prototype 450 mm stage. And an Intel materials scientist said the four major wafer manufacturers all are starting to make 450 mm single crystal wafers, though they don’t want to talk about it publicly.

At Semicon West in July, there were plenty of executives who said they were dead set against 450 mm, that it doesn’t make economic sense, now or ever, that the industry should focus on reducing cycle times for 300 mm tools, and so on. Executives at Applied Materials, ASML, Novellus, all have been adamant in their opposition to 450 mm. SEMI has reflected their members’ views in an aggressive series of white papers and public meetings, arguing for focused attention on 300 mm productivity improvements.

Is this series of “No’s” a means of wresting R&D dollars out of the major device makers? For a couple of years now, discussions have been going on about creation of an R&D fund that would take money from the IC manufacturers that back 450 mm and divvy it out to the equipment makers. While that would seem to make perfect sense in a time of squeezed R&D budgets, nothing has been decided, ISMI managers said at the symposium.

So who to believe? Are the major IC manufacturers which back the 450 mm transition -- which include Intel, Samsung, and TSMC – big enough to get what they want? If a handful of companies control 60-70% of the equipment spending, at some point are they going to get what they want?

It takes some listening skills to figure out which way the wind is blowing in 450 mm development. It is like a kid who asks his mother for a new bike. She says ‘No, but if you turn off the TV and get out there and rake the leaves, Santa Claus might bring you something good.’

Meanwhile, the technical investigation continues. A source at a lithography maker said one question is whether the 450 mm wafers can be made flat enough. By the time 450 mm factories are built, leading edge device makers will be using 16 nm generation technology, he said. That could put the onus on wafer flatness like never before. Exposing ultra-thin photoresists on the much larger wafers could prove to be an engineering challenge. In response, the Intel materials scientist said that if EUV lithography is in use then, the improved depth of field provided by EUV could help in that regard. “There are so many challenges, it is hard to say that flatness is the biggest. But we will figure out how to solve these problems,” he said.

That seems to be one school of thought. That this time around is no different than the transitions to 200 mm or 300 mm wafers. The same technical and business challenges, the same posturing, with the end result being adoption of the larger wafer size.

That may be how things will go this time around. The Big Three will get even bigger, the smaller chip companies will go fabless, and the push to do 450 mm will be aided by a pool of R&D dollars for the equipment industry. One by one, challenges will be overcome, both technical and economic.

Somehow, however, the No’s coming from the equipment industry this time around seem different than a dozen years ago. It feels different. If equipment CEOs are saying No in public and Yes in private to big customers like Intel and Samsung, that would qualify some of them for Acadamy Awards in acting. More likely, they are sitting down with long faces and saying, ‘Give us enough money to get the ball rolling.’ In today’s business climate, that seems a reasonable survival strategy. But the leaves sure are piling high.

Posted by David Lammers on October 23, 2008 | Comments (1)