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Staying the course while uncertainty prevails

Semicon West, San Francisco, July 10 to 14, 2006
Staying the course while uncertainty prevails

With more than 1,200 exhibitors and 40,000 attendees, Semicon West still is a pretty impressive event. But the changes are palpable: The days of selling equipment on the show floor are gone. What remains is meeting and greeting customers, and networking with the rest of the industry.

Consequently, exhibitor booths at Semicon West 2006 were noticeably smaller and more utilitarian, while the show’s sponsor dedicated more time and energy to educative forums – modeled after comparable trade shows in Europe. Four new “TechXSPOTs” featured keynotes and collaborative partnerships on innovation and industry policy.

Test, Assembly and Packaging was the theme of one of them, luring attendees to the latest in packaging roadmapping and the still hot (at least in the U.S.) topic of lead-free soldering. Another regular event at Semicon West, the day-long ITRS Roadmap Conference, identified the latest updates of its 2005 edition, namely new thermal management strategies for ever more complex chips: silicon on diamond (SiD) and silicon on silicon carbide (SiC), and the means and ways to scalable productization.
The impending transition to 450 mm wafers got into a vehement pro and con dispute, as Iddo Hadar of Applied Materials questioned their cost advantage against today’s 300 mm diameter for the sake of Moore’s Law. It would take 10 to 15 new fabs over 15 years, Haddar said, to recoup the $ 15 bn investment each to achieve a 15 % return on investment. A better road to higher front-end productivity, he said, would be small-lot wafer processing. But this, too, is uncharted territory.
Closer to back-end concerns were the remarks of Jim Healy of Logic Vision: a stricter confluence of ATE and DFT (design for testing) is needed to manage the cost of debug, characterization and test.
Packaging: the trend from wirebond to flip chip is accelerating. “Flip chip is where silicon and solder meet,” says Steve Anderson of Surfect Technologies. Wirebonding still dominates the markets at 90 %. The push into flip chip will come from the memory markets: “bumping is a mass production process, not a serial process like wirebonding.”
Spending on new fabs, at a total of $ 55 bn, is at an all-time high this year so the mid-year mantra goes – probably cresting in 2007. About 14 memory fabs will come on-stream next year. Yet, nobody knows fur sure, where the industry is really headed. Some fear capacity glut and inventory clog if PC markets keep stalling into the near-term future.
So, Semi holds on to its sober outlook: after the decline of 2005 capital equipment sales should grow to $ 39 bn this year, to stay flat in 2007. New growth is seen for 2008, reaching a volume of $ 44 bn.
News from the EUV front as a future driver: ASML will ship first tools to IMEC and Albany Nanotech soon – for research and development only. EUV mass production still has to wait its turn.
Werner Schulz
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