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Monday morning cup o' coffee steams with unexpected flavors |
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Sep 24, 2007 at 08:18 AM |
During the past week or so, there have been several unexpected news items, along with the usual unending stream of biz-as-usual flotsam.
As coffee warms the global mug this Monday, here are a few thoughts on some surprising recent storylines.
- One name I did not expect to see paired ever again with the title "president/CEO of semiconductor company" was Ulrich Schumacher. He helped push the Infineon IPO, extricating the Siemens chipmaking business from the German parent company, but left in a huff in 2004 after a spat with the board. The circumstances of his departure remain murky, and anyone who's read the business pages (and the German mainstream press) over the past year or two knows of the scandals that have wreaked havoc at the joined-at-the-hip companies since he left. After a couple of years as a big wheel at private-equity purveyors Francisco Partners (where he had some influence on the flash marriage of Intel and STMicro, which has become the new Francisco-shepherded Numonyx), Ulrich has taken on the roles of pres, chief exec, and board member at Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. in Shanghai. Sometimes it takes a checkered-past player like Ulrich to turn a sometimes-troubled company like GSMC into a player itself.
- Speaking of the flash world, Spansion's claim to the first 300-mm production NOR fab is a mild surprise, given the 300-mm capability in other areas of Intel (as part of Numonyx) and Samsung. But Spansion is number one in that particular memory sector, so why shouldn't the company be first to the bigger substrate fab?
- And speaking of sometimes-troubled chipmakers, Tower Semi scored a major coup with its volume production deal with an unnamed "first-tier" U.S. IDM, whose 130-nm process Tower will be ramping hard by the end of the year. The Israeli foundry has been treading red ink for years, hanging on for dear life in the competitive contact chip-manufacturing space. Now, with this and other deals, it's popping output from 5000 to 8000 wafers per month in its new fab. Will profitable margins (gasp!) soon be within Tower's reach?
- A couple of unexpected news bits from Intel (I know, enough Intel already!), one sweet, the other sour. On the sweet side, the company announced at its Developer Forum that it had finally named a system-on-a-chip architecture after the beloved Gordon Moore---code-name Moorestown. (What's next, code-name Grovester?) As for the sour, the company will have to lay off 200 employees from its Irish site in Leixlip, outside of Dubtown. Although said to be "voluntary," it marks the first time that the Big Chip Fella has let people go for belt-tightening reasons at the Eire fabs.
- News reports out of Japan have anonymous sources saying that Sony is leaving the fab biz or at least selling major fab assets to Toshiba, stories that Sony has thus far denied. The iconic Japanese company has had its share of serious manufacturing woes, with serious tsunamis of defects hitting its chip and battery factories. And if you consider Sony's partnership with IBM (hey, why not let Big Blue do more of the production?), you have to ponder the ultimate validity of the reports.
- Could NXP (ex-Philips Semi) have pulled the plug on its Boeblingen, Germany, fab too soon? The company now says that, because of unexpected demand for the devices produced there, it will continue manufacturing at the 200-mm facility into next year, instead of shuttering the plant by year's end. Whether this is just a small hiccup in NXP's vow to lighten its fab assets or a reappraisal of that strategy remains to be seen.
- The history of scientific investigation brims with experimental examples of researchers discovering something they weren't looking for. Add to that long list the efforts of a U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) team who were trying to come up with a relatively easy, fast method for making block copolymers (BCPs) samples for measurement purposes. In the process, they came up with a novel "cold zone" anneal, "where the polymers are completely processed well below their order-disorder transition temperature," according to the NIST press release. The lower-temp processing "not only works with BCPs for which hot-zone annealing is impractical...but also repeatedly produces a highly ordered thin film in a matter of minutes." The simplicity, consistent quality, and lack of sample dimension limitations have drawn the attention of certain chip and data storage companies, apparently for the process's potential in fabricating "highly ordered sub-30-nm features." (The paper describing these NIST findings appears in the Sept. 12 issue of Nano Letters.) File this story in the positive category of the law(s) of unintended consequences.
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