INDUSTRY NEWS

Let's get rolling

No more cleanrooms. No more silicon wafers. No more long lead times. And no more exorbitant production costs.

Those are the promises made by Ball Semiconductor, a 1996 Texas start-up with a novel, but untested, chipmaking concept. The company proposes making ICs on silicon balls propelled through a maze of tubes and pipes up to one-third of a mile long. Measuring 1 mm in diameter, the spherical devices would undergo typical fabrication steps such as deposition, etch, and lithography without touching the interior walls of the ultraclean pipes. Ball's founder, Akira Ishikawa, says the system could produce 2500 ball ICs per second, or the equivalent of 20,000 8-in. wafers per month. Ishikawa, the former president of TI Japan, says Ball was planning to produce a prototype this June. The entire process would take only five days instead of the current minimum of at least six weeks in a wafer fab.

The company acknowledges the technical hurdles. For one, it will have to build a completely new set of process equipment. The start-up has signed agreements with tool manufacturers and university R&D labs to speed development. It plans to spend at least $70 million in R&D in order to get the balls rolling by 2000. Skeptics can see whether the company's concept is just a pipe dream when Ball holds a seminar July 11—12 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the weekend before the start of Semicon West 98.

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