Industry News
Future Horizons looks to a positive future
IN A RECENT monthly report Future Horizons paints a positive picture of the prospects of the semiconductor industry, in line with the predictions of its 2010 Annual Semiconductor Report. This is tempered with a warning for companies to stop revelling in inappropriate pessimism. On the one hand, Future Horizons indicates that semiconductor sales have continued to be very strong. This looks set to continue for the rest of the year, resulting in a 2010 that is massively improved on 2009. On the other hand, several companies still remain unjustifiably pessimistic and confused about the state of the market. Companies now have an opportunity to dominate the market. Instead they continue to be cautious, undermining their own prospects of making some serious money.
Pessimism is no longer appropriate,
the report indicates, given the current market conditions. IC sales in January were up four point eight percent versus December on a five-week-month- adjusted basis. The real significance of January is its potential impact on first
Gold tipped to bond
quarter sales. If this run rate to continue in the emerging WTST reports through February and March, first quarter sales would be up eight percent versus Q4-09. That would make 2010 grow a staggering 40 percent on 2009. Despite these figures being inflated due to a recessionary year, the overall trend is still very encouraging. “Anecdotally order books are
strong, and starting to firm-up for the second half of 2010,” commented Malcolm Penn. “Companies now have more orders than they can deliver. Backlogs are being scrutinised and culled, small firms and small orders are being ignored, higher margin shipments are being prioritised.
Copper growth to continue
THE LONG awaited transition to copper interconnects for memory devices skyrocketed in 2009, and will impact nearly every sector of the
semiconductor equipment market into 2011, according to the report 300mm/Copper/Low-K Convergence: Timing, Trends, Issues, Market Analysis, published by The Information Network. In late 2006. Micron Technology became the first DRAM vendor to produce commodity DRAM with copper, rather than traditional aluminum, interconnect. Elpida followed a year later. The adoption of copper in memory devices is currently under way, and all memory suppliers, led by Samsung, spent huge sums of money upgrading as many of their lines
as they could to copper and this change had an important impact on purchases of copper deposition equipment and materials in 2009.
“While the overall market
decreased more than 40% in 2009, equipment tied to copper interconnect decreased only 8.7%, noted Dr. Robert N. Castellano.
The impact of this transition on
processing equipment was obvious in equipment used with traditional aluminium interconnects. For example, the high-density plasma CVD sector (HDPCVD), which is used for depositing undoped (USG) and doped (PSG and FSG) films saw revenues drop 72% in 2009. A drop in Metal Etch equipment revenues registered a similar drop.
FEEDBACK from the World Gold Council (WGC) sponsored seminar entitled held in conjunction with SEMI confirmed industry concerns with copper bonding wire. The seminar aimed to educate and inform engineers about the use of gold in semiconductor packaging and was attended by leading companies in the semiconductor supply chain. This seminar provided useful and factual information about gold in the bonding wire process to help the industry understand how gold can still be viewed as a cost effective choice in many applications and how gold’s inherent material properties are best suited to the wire bonding process Richard Holliday, Director, Industrial
at World Gold Council, says: “Feedback from the participants at the seminar showed that the semiconductor industry still has doubts about the reliability of copper bonding wire versus gold. About 50% of the attendees at the event have encountered problems with copper wire bonding in production, including low production yields. Instead of switching many are looking to reduce gold costs through wire diameter reduction or other design changes as the preferred strategy.
The integration of copper into memory devices presents a different set of challenges than the long-established logic processes. DRAM and Flash, which comprise the majority of the memory applications, exhibit high aspect ratios, small CD sizes, and critical sensitivity to line resistance. The growth of the PVD market was
strong for the deposition of the copper barrier metal, which is typically a bi- layer of Ta/TaN, or TiN. However, the transition to memory presents challenges. As feature size continues to shrink, a thinner barrier metal is required to maximize copper volume in the damascene structure and maintain effective resistivity. Ultra-thin barrier metals must achieve optimum step coverage, density, and morphology in high aspect ratio trenches and vias.
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www.euroasiasemiconductor.com Issue II 2010
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