EDITOR'S PAGE

'Tis Semicon season, again

Another year has rushed by and Semicon West season is upon us again. Folks in the ultra-fast-paced semiconductor and semiconductor equipment, components, and materials industries are no strangers to time whirring by like a hummingbird in flight. The year since the last Big Show has seen an incredible amount of change in the microchip realm, on both the technological and business sides.

The most obvious change is that things are looking up, not down. The Moscone and McEnery were filled with gloomy souls last July, wondering when sales would start to pick up. After several months of positive book-to-bill reports and other economic indicators, it's clear the worst is over. Although few are seeing predownturn levels of business just yet, signs are positive and orders are starting to come in. One difference this time is that the foundries in Taiwan and Singapore are driving much of the recovery, although recent capital spending announcements from Samsung, NEC, and others show the memory crowd gearing up for another push.

If you plotted out all the mergers, acquisitions, spin-offs, strategic alliances, and name changes since last summer, your chart might rival the intricacies of a photomask pattern. The Hyundai—LG Semicon shotgun marriage and Philips's hostile, then friendly buyout of VLSI may have garnered the most headlines, but supplier companies such as ATMI and USFilter (which has itself been bought by French water giant Vivendi) have grown tremendously through their acquisitions strategies. Three spin-offs of note — Conexant from Rockwell, Infineon from Siemens, and Arch Chemicals from Olin — are notable not only for creating newly independent, more focused entities but also for a troubling trend toward newly coined, important-sounding names that don't exactly roll off the tongue. One market segment in which alliances have become the name of the game over the past year is electronic materials, with most of the major chemical, gas, slurry, and water players joining forces in various combinations.

Market conditions may not have been favorable until recently, yet many companies on both sides of the user-vendor divide have been busy renovating, expanding, and upgrading their existing plants or building new ones, adding capacity and technical capabilities in anticipation of an increase in customer demand. Many chipmakers, though loathe to build new fabs, have been converting older 6-inch factories to 8-inch. A new paradigm has emerged in the supplier community—the process integration line. Applied Materials's trend-setting EPIC facility will soon be joined by mini—pilot lines at AlliedSignal, Novellus, Eaton, and several other companies.

Technological advances have also continued at their usual stunning pace over the past year. Much of the booming new materials market, especially copper/dual damascene, has matured from alpha- and beta-level tools and processes to production-worthy modules. Most of the top semiconductor companies have either started producing, piloting, or developing their own copper chips. Many in the CMP community have focused their attentions on web- or belt-based polishing technologies, with Applied's recent—and pricey— acquisition of Obsidian the latest in a growing list of developments. While an industry weary of the off-again/on-again push to 300 mm has celebrated SC300's first actual devices made on the large substrate and the TSMC-Vanguard joint venture's fab-construction announcement, it has grown restive waiting for Intel to make its 12-inch intentions known. The field in next-generation lithography has narrowed, with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and the e-beam—based Scalpel now the front-runners. On the optical lithography side, researchers continue to defy the experts by pushing the capabilities of DUV tools, masks, and resists down to as low as 70 nm, a level thought impossible just a few years ago. The emergence of Ball Semiconductor has provided a bit of whimsy, as the Texas-based concern makes progress manufacturing devices on spherical silicon balls.

Will we have as much to look back on next year at this time? That's hard to say, although we will know how hungry the Y2K bug was and whether SEMI will move the Big Show to the neon glow of Las Vegas. One thing's for sure—the semiconductor industry will continue its impressive run well into the next century.

Tom Cheyney
Editor

tom.cheyney@cancom.com
http://www.micromagazine.com

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