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May 6, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (4)

The three companies openly pushing for 450 mm wafers are working on a plan to subsidize the equipment industry’s 450 mm development effort. The carrot will be large, perhaps approaching a billion dollars when all is said and done. Its increasingly clear that a combined stimulus package is needed to prompt the equipment vendors to start 450 mm development, a well-placed source in Austin said.

Intel Corp., Samsung Electronics Co., and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. went public Monday with their support for a transition to 450 mm wafers beginning in 2012. Toshiba Corp. is keeping out of the spotlight, but also is backing the transition. The companies said the 450 mm effort will develop standards...Read More

April 30, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC) held its annual technology symposium in Austin Tuesday (April 29), with much of the attention on the foundry’s 40 nm technology. TSMC would prefer that its leading edge customers go directly from 65 to 40 nm design rules, making 40 nm much more than an afterthought 0.9× linear shrink. In fact, TSMC will skip 45 nm and only offer 40 nm for the general (G) and (LPG) processes, with 45 nm and 40 nm offerings for the low power (LP) process which Qualcomm Inc. and others use.

J.C. Huang, platform marketing manager for TSMC’s advanced technology division, said in his presentation that there is no performance gain when migrating from the 65LP process to the 40LP process. Asking a rh...Read More

April 9, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (3)

John Halladay, a clean process manager at Spansion’s Fab 25, brought a good mystery to Sematech’s Surface Preparation and Cleaning Conference here last week.

While yield losses often are at the edge of the wafer, Spansion had a donut-shaped area at the center of the wafer populated with bad die. At first, engineers thought the culprit was the trench plasma-etch process. 

The Spansion team brought in detectives from SEZ America (...Read More

March 27, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Count Bill McClean, president of IC Insights Inc. (Scottsdale, Ariz.), among the optimists.

His forecast calls for the overall semiconductor industry to reach ~$444B by 2012, up from $237B last year. That is a $207B increase in annual industry revenues over the next five years, a compound annual growth (CAGR) rate of ~11.5%.

“In general, when you look out the next five years, we see moderate growth forecasts compared with the previous cyclical upturns. We don’t see any 20%+ increases in the next five years, but we do see good demand-driven years in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Each of those years should have growth ...Read More

March 20, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

That phony veil of dispassion that people often hide behind slipped off at the SEMI Austin forum Wednesday. Tim Hayden, the CEO of Rite Track Inc. (West Chester, Ohio), started it, and then Kelly McAndrew, CEO of Applied Mechanical Corp. (Austin, Texas) added his own lively observations about what is going on in the United States and the wider chip manufacturing industry.

Hayden rose up through Cincinnati’s machine tool industry and now runs the 150-person Rite Track, which customizes remanufactured track systems for the semiconductor, thin film head, solar cell, and MEMS industries. It is a business which requires a mixture of skills, including an ability to build customized interfaces to a factory’s automation ...Read More