With 2006 almost over and 2007, that most James Bondish of new-century years, nearly upon us, it's time to reflect.
Here's my take on some of the stories, big and small, that took place on what was a good revenue year for most inhabitants of Planet Silicon (despite those pesky stock-option backdating problems).
On the business side, mergers, acquisitions, buyouts, and spinoffs took place at a sometimes furious pace, and certain sectors saw significant consolidation. Private equity groups spent serious coin to gobble up Freescale and the former Philips Semiconductor (now NXP) on the chip side, while Philips also sold its AMS metrology tool unit to another group of investors. The ranks of metrology equipment vendors shrank, as Rudolph merged with August and Nanometrics acquired Accent Optical and Soluris, but KLA-Tencor's successful wooing of ADE stood out as the whopper deal.
Infineon spun off its memory business, creating the now publicly traded and alternately pronounced Qimonda (you say chi-mond-ah, I say key-mond-ah). Confounding some industry analysts, AMD bought ATI and instantly pulled itself up into the chipmakers' Top 10, further rattling Intel's cage. X-Fab and 1st Silicon merged, making things a bit more interesting in the midtier foundry market. And as the daylight hours grew short in December (in the northern hemisphere anyway), LSI Logic---which earlier sold its Gresham fab to ON Semi and its Colorado facility to dPix---agreed to buy Agere in a good ol' fashioned multibillion-dollar stock purchase deal.
Although the creation of Acquicor and its pending merger with Jazz Semi did not make as many waves as the higher-profile deals, one of Acquicor's principals may have slipped some people's notice. Silicon Valley icon (as in iconoclast) Steve Wozniak, the tech brains behind the birth of Apple but someone not usually associated with the chipmaking world, has taken an exec VP/CTO role with the new venture. The Woz joins industry veteran (and former Apple exec) Gil Amelio and fellow corporate heavy-hitter Ellen Hancock in the Acquicor leadership troika.
2006 also saw a signficant increase in the semiconductor manufacturing world's investment and participation in the burgeoning solar-cell industry. Applied Materials plans to leverage its purchase of Applied Films and existing internal know-how into both the silicon-based and thin-film channels of the rapidly growing solar-cell toolmaking arena. Cypress Semi's SunPower subsidiary, which continues to run at full capacity, printing money as well as PV cells, recently announced plans to build a new solar fab in India.
Wafermaker MEMC signed multiyear deals with different companies to help finance its own capacity needs and guarantee the supply of silicon wafers to photovoltaic device manufacturers. A possible looming polysilicon shortage remains the elephant in the room in the materials arena. Hemlock and other raw poly suppliers are racing to add capacity as the demand, especially from the solar-cell manufacturers but also the escalating hunger for 300-mm wafers, has challenged the supply chain at times.
Several interesting joint ventures came to light across the chipmaking foodchain. AMAT and Dainippon Screen set up shop to form Sokudo, which will take on TEL's near-monopoly in the lithography-track tool segment, much to the delight of certain chipmakers seeking a second source for the critical systems and to the consternation of others who wish that Applied would keep its massive hands out of that part of the equipment business. Two intriguing examples of customers and suppliers getting in bed were Photronics and Micron's new photomask venture and Samsung and Siltronics' Singapore wafermaking partnership. One counterintuitive, anticooperative bit of news came when Reuters reported that Japanese chippie Rohm was planning to make its own 300-mm wafers, instead of outsourcing them.
A 2006 trend near and dear to those who'd like to keep some chip-manufacturing Stateside is the healthy number of both new fabs and fab upgrades taking place in the lower 48. The one deal that garnered the most attention was AMD's decision to build its next round of facilities north of Albany, NY, with construction set to start sometime between July 2007 and July 2009. Texas Instruments and IBM continue to work on their new fabs, while Intel ramped up new lines in Chandler, AZ, and elsewhere. NEC, Samsung, Micron, and Hynix all said they were expanding or adding to exisiting U.S. fab sites as well.
On the manufacturing front, 2006 also marked the year that immersion lithography dove into the fabs. Although whole-hog production using IML will have to wait until the 45-nm process generation, both Nikon and ASML have shipped tools to several suppliers in what has been a two-horse race so far between the leading litho equipment vendors. (Canon says it will ship its first IML tools in 2007, leaving the rest of us in a definite wait-and-see mode.) Although the question of problematic defectivity remains open until immersion is fully implemented on the fab lines, it's apparent that wet litho is for real.
Still, 45-nm looks both wet and dry when it comes to litho strategies, with Intel and others preferring a dry double-patterning approach. IBM, TSMC, TI, Samsung, Toshiba, UMC, and others have a wet look to their 45-nm (or rough half-pitch equivalent, in the case of the memory guys) and 32-nm process technology roadmaps. One piece of good though somewhat overlooked news is that the use of some sort of 193-nm hyper-NA IML at 32 nm means that the lithography wavelength will have remained unchanged for five process generations, a fortuitous technology extension made possible by the emergence of immersion as a viable alternative to the now-defenestrated 157-nm gameplan.
On the materials side, 2006 could also be seen as the year when the silicon-on-insulator naysayers lost their credibility. SOI wafers are now used in an increasing variety of applications, with IBM, AMD, Freescale, and other major players championing the enhanced substrates. Major supplier Soitec has seen record revenues, started to expand its main Bernin, France, factories, and begun work on its first Asian manufacturing site in Singapore.
Speaking of Singapore, it not only landed the Soitec plant and the aforementioned Samsung-Siltronic JV wafermaking house, but the tech-saavy city-state scored a coup when IM Flash Technologies, the Intel-Micron NAND partnership, decided to build its fab there. Throw in some technology, alliance, and business gains by Chartered Semi and the ramp-up of UMC's Fab 12i, and it turned into a nice little year for Singapore's semiconductor sector.
Another noteworthy trend was the inexorable maturation of both the design for manufacturing/design for manufacturability (both = DFM) market space and the strategies and product/technology mixes employed by the participants in that space. TSMC, UMC, and the other major foundries as well as their fabless and IDM partners touted their DFM capabilities, both proprietary and developed with the vendor community, especially in the frenzy to ramp 65-nm product. Intriguing start-up and early-stage companies like Invarium, Clear Shape, Ponte Solutions, Blaze DFM, Pyxis, Luminescent, and Brion (now being bought by ASML) were either tweaking the noses of established EDA powerhouses Synopsys, Mentor Graphics, and Cadence, partnering with them, or being acquired by them.
I know I skipped over other stories---the 300-mm Prime initiative; Intel's move into Vietnam, and its layoffs and other trials and tribulations; Sony's multiple manufacturing woes; Italy winning the World Cup; the Hewlett-Packard scandals and my disappointment at not being one of the snooped-on journalists; Via's bold carbon-footprint reduction strategy; MEMS getting Wiiggy in the gaming mainstream; Elpida and Powerchip's intentions to build up absurd amounts of memory capacity; Balazs Labs' parts-per-quadrillion (parts-per-whatever, fergawdsakes!) analytical capabilities; the wholehearted embrace of the periodic table in the materials development area; my iPod's 6000+ song library; Samsung kicking ass and taking names; further adventures in strain engineering and other transistor-enhancement shenanigans; India's possible emergence as a chipmaking region; the launch of homegrown Chinese tool company AMEC; the slightly improving fortunes of atomic-layer deposition; countless cool nanotech research results and even a few examples of commercialization; the demise of MICRO and Semiconductor Manufacturing magazines---phew!---but I need to finish my post-Christmas recovery and gird myself for the new year.
Speaking of which, Happy New Year to all from the "staff" (uh, that would be me) here at Chip Shots. See you in 2007!
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