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Sematech Divided
October 31, 2007
The situation at Sematech these days is like pre-Meiji Japan, when the emperor lived in Kyoto and the shogun, with the real power, resided in Edo, what is now modern-day Tokyo. (The Edo of the 1800s regularly caught fire, and the Japanese, writes historian and literary translator Edward Seidensticker, were as proud of their devastating fires as they were of their ability to quickly rebuild.)
Earlier this year, when the New York state legislature approved a five-year, $300M package of subsidies for Sematech, some publicity-minded person cooked up the idea that New York’s money should buy them some status, with the headquarters of Sematech International in Albany and plain-old Sematech headquartered in Austin.
And then a few weeks ago the Austin American-Statesman reported that the Sematech fab in Austin, the Advanced Technology Development Facility (ATDF), was up for sale.
Reporters here in Austin increasingly fretted that Sematech would bit-by-bit move to Albany and we wouldn’t have any technologists left in Austin to talk to in person. (Not to mention Dallas, with the 500 technologists at Texas Instruments getting axed). Remember, journalists are only as good as their sources, preferably people to go to long lunches with.
The bottom line seems to be that Sematech’s lithography, 3-D interconnect, and most of the metrology programs are ensconced up in Albany. Austin gets to keep the front-end transistor research program, though it wouldn’t surprise anyone if that moves north in a few years, drawn by the 300 mm tools bought with those 2:1 matching grants from the New York state coffers.
What may save the front end program for Austin is Intel. According to this line of thought, lithography research can go to Albany, a territory where Intel's rival IBM dominates. Since Intel wants lithography research to pass on to the wider industry and the scanner vendors, it doesn’t bother Intel that much for lithography to move to New York (or Leuven). Transistor research is an area where Intel tends to innovate internally. Any sharing of front-end transistor technology that goes on within Sematech is better done in the more neutral territory of Austin, a bit more distant from Fishkill, Yorktown Heights, and Armonk.
Does this line of thinking hold any water in the 21st century. Who knows?
What Sematech Austin has going for it is the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative, better known as ISMI. With the 300mmPrime and 450 mm programs as part of ISMI, that group is in the middle of many of the more-interesting standards and productivity issues.
Maybe the Japanese knew something, after all, when they divided power between two capitals, Kyoto and Edo. We can live with it, just as the Japanese did...until Admiral Perry's Black Ships came.
Posted by David Lammers on October 31, 2007 | Comments (1)
