It's been almost a month since Semicon West 2007 rampaged through the Moscone Center in San Francisco, so it's time to warm up some leftovers before I move on.
With all the iPhone hype leading up to Semicon, I expected to see hordes of attendees and exhibitors touchscreening the slick new handheld.
How many did I actually see? Zero. Zip. Nada. When I asked some of the early-adopter gadgetheads I knew about the baffling iPhone void, several of them pointed to the device's immaturity as a corporate communications device (can't be trusted yet, unlike the ubiquitous Crackberry), as well as AT&T's service exclusivity. Where did I end up seeing my first iPhone in the Bay Area? As I waited in the departure area at Oakland Airport on my way out of town.
The cleverest bit of small-form-factor marketing was Cymer's possession of the keycards at the Marriott, with the elevator-friendly slogan, "Taking it to the next level." I don't know if Cymer or anyone else branded other hotel roomcards, but I applaud the laser light-source leaders for their ingenuity at getting their corporate moniker into a lot of folks' hands and pockets. There were possible downsides to the company's approach, however: Every time a Semiconer returned to his or her room at the hotel, he or she was reminded of Cymer with throbbing feet and head, or thought of Cymer through the haze of a load from an evening's worth of freely flowing "hostility suite" libations.
Charlie Gay, one of Applied Materials' photovoltaic guru-execs, came up with a funny line during his "ridiculously oversubscribed" (apologies to my Brit friends) TechXpot presentation. When questioned about how often solar arrays should be cleaned, and whether there was any loss of output when an array was dirty, Charlie came out with what may become a domestic-front cliche for the renewable energy era: "Honey, would you go out and clean the array today?"
When are semiconductor equipment companies being told they will have to get their 450-mm pilot lines ready? According to one very reliable source, those lines will need to be ready by 2012, with a production window of 2014 or 2015. The same source said to expect "discontinuities" in the rollout of 450-mm. It seems that the next wafer-size transition has picked up steam, even if it's only be driven hard by Intel, Samsung, and TSMC and SEMI and most of its members will have to be dragged kicking and screaming into participating.
On the smaller wafer front, all the talk about the "300-mm Prime" initiative has led to discussions of what might be called "200-mm Prime." Process module outsourcers like Entrepix and Innovion note the pleas of many current and potential customers, including some biggies, to help wring more productivity out of their aging 200-mm fabs. ISMI and Sematech are also addressing this issue, with possible programs in the works. This may be what we in the news biz call a "breaking story."
One industry term that transitioned during the show week from buzzword to cliche was "virtual fab." When you get that 20K-wafer-start-per-week thing uploaded to the Holodeck, then come talk to me about a truly virtual fab. And while you're at it, start organizing those groups of EDA folks for some real fab tours to see how real manufacturing is done.
Metryx's approach to metrology---essentially weighing wafers, pre- and postprocess, as a means of simple yet highly accurate inline control---has intrigued me since I first heard of the U.K.-based company a year or two ago. I finally had a chance to meet with pres/CEO Adrian Kiermasz and worldwide tech director Liam Cunnane, who brought me up to speed. The told me their metrology technique---which detects shifts in the mass mean distribution---can detect changes on gate structures down to well below a nanometer, an angstrom or less in some cases, and is independent of which material is being measured. One customer using the tool on BEOL barrier layers about 30 angstroms thick is pleased with the results. "Some customers want more throughput," Adrian said, "while others are quite happy" with the current 60 wafers/hour rate. The tool could run through 95% of processes and "fingerprint" whole lots, factoring in the notion that one process's post- is the next process sequence's pre-, thus tremendously reducing test wafer use and scrap in general. So far, Metryx has an installed base of 20 tools, most running in high-volume 300-mm facilities, with another five tools ordered and on backlog. Ah, metrology for the masses....
While leaving what has become known around Semicon West as "THE Party" at the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, one Loomis Group smartass was heard to say that the agency sees the blowout (which they created and expanded) as one of their "core competencies." Just wish more partygoers had danced and grooved to the incredible Cubano-style Latin big band than had hunkered over the ersatz gambling tables. Sometimes, the geeks don't get it. What coulda been a slammin' fiesta con clave, instead ended lamely sin clave.
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