Semiconductor Firm Opens New Lab Facilities

Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. has opened new lab facilities and expanded technical resources at its sales offices in the U.K., Korea, and China. These new facilities and resources enable Peregrine to service key global markets during local business hours.

“Field Application Engineering (FAE) support is the secret ingredient to sales success in this fast-paced global economy,” says Carl Burrow, VP of sales for Peregrine. “Peregrine can now develop deeper technical relationships with customers and work together in real time as they deploy our technology.”

Peregrine’s 2013 facilities expansion began with Korea in April, the U.K. in July. and China in October. The new facilities are co-located with existing Peregrine sales offices and offer complete lab-bench capabilities supported by RF engineering technical staff.

Diana Baxter, director of worldwide applications engineering for Peregrine and architect of this initiative says, “In today’s global economy, businesses operate 24 hours a day around the world. To support customers locally, Peregrine has embraced this idea and expanded our presence by placing highly technical experts in the field. This support model enables our customers to quickly move forward when using our products.”

Malaysia Foundry to Take X-Fab to 180nm, 130nm

X-Fab Silicon Foundries co-CEO Rudi De Winter reflects on company milestones such as its acquisition of 1st Silicon in Malaysia and its shift to manufacturing on 200mm wafers in Europe. De Winter also touched upon competitive and regional issues affecting X-Fab.

Germany-based X-Fab Silicon Foundries is doing well according to co-CEO Rudi De Winter, but as a private company it is not obliged to be very forthcoming with its numbers. The company is coming towards the end of a transition to 200mm wafer production and sees scope for expansion in its current fabs and in particular at X-Fab Sarawak, its wafer fab in Malaysia.

X-Fab, best known as a European foundry focused on analogue, mixed-signal and specialty processes, emerged from VEB Mikroelektronik in Erfurt, East Germany in 1992 soon after the re-unification of the country. The company acquired a few amortized, older wafer fabs and deployed a foundry service business model at a time when it was relatively new and mainly being applied to digital CMOS production.

The company, now majority owned by Belgium-based Xtrion, is focused on analogue and mixed-signal processes and with much of its work in the industrial and automotive sectors the company was not as susceptible to the global economic malaise of 2008 and 2009 as some other companies.

"We're doing well. We've grown through acquisition. Our latest one was 1st Silicon in Malaysia. That was fully loaded when we acquired it but we had to find new business," De Winter said. The acquisition took place in 2006 and part of the transition was to qualify the fab for the production of automotive ICs with multiple customers. "The fab runs 200mm wafers down to 130nm. It's the next generation from what we have in Erfurt," De Winter said.

De Winter said that in 2013 the Malaysia fab is at breakeven and that from now on he expects production there to grow profitably. "Manufacturing capacity there is about 20,000 wafer starts per month. We can further increase that to 30,000 wafers per month with additional equipment," said De Winter. "We installed 0.35µm HV CMOS applicable to automotive applications with 100V and a lot of different modules. We also have 0.18µm installed there."

Indeed overall X-Fab's highest shipping node is 0.35µm with mixed-signal capability, De Winter said. "The 0.35µm is still the most popular although 0.18µm is on a par with it in terms of enquiries."

X-Fab does have a more recent manufacturing acquisition than its fab in Malaysia. In November 2012 X-Fab increased its shareholding in MEMS Foundry Itzehoe to 51 per cent and renamed the company X-Fab MEMS Foundry Itzehoe. "But Itzehoe is MEMS only. The processes are varied so it is very hard to talk about wafer starts per month." But Itzehoe runs 200mm wafers as standard something that is unusual in the MEMS sector and which gives X-Fab an economic advantage.

The majority of X-Fabs' five wafer fabs are on 200mm. Erfurt runs a mix of 6-inch and 200mm wafers and Dresden will have converted to 200mm wafers only by mid-2014, said De Winter. The exception is X-Fab's facility in Lubbock, Texas, which runs specialty processes on 6-inch wafers. "In fact, we announced a deal with Cymbet so we are making batteries on silicon there," he said.

Abu Dhabi took a step closer to realizing its ambitions of becoming a serious player in the semiconductor industry after a “cleanroom” facility in the Masdar Institute became fully operational.

Pioneering Cleanroom at Masdar Institute Now Fully Operational

The ATIC Cleanroom at Masdar Institute is now operational, significantly enhancing Abu Dhabi’s competitive semiconductor research capabilities. Built as a part of a broader research and academic collaboration between the Advanced Technology Investment Company and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, the facility provides the ultra-clean environment and photolithography tools needed for advanced microelectronics research and small-scale production.

“This facility is a strong asset to research in advanced technology, and the only such cleanroom in the GCC,” says Sami Issa, Executive Director at ATIC. “The research taking place in this cleanroom is guided by targeted industry and academic collaboration, playing a key role driving technology development while laying the foundations for a thriving research hub in the region. This facility is also an excellent example of what can be accomplished from the focused collaboration of organizations committed to our Emirate’s development.”

Dr. Fred Moavenzadeh, President of Masdar Institute, says, “The cleanroom facility reiterates our ongoing research collaboration with ATIC, one of our key stakeholders. With the support of the UAE’s leadership, Masdar Institute continues to offer new avenues for fostering specific skills of students in the semiconductor industry. We believe the facility will contribute further to strengthening Abu Dhabi’s knowledge capital in the high-technology sector.”

Up to 10,000 times cleaner than a medical operating theater, cleanrooms are critical to maintaining the sterile environment needed for semiconductor manufacturing. Research in the facility can occur on parameters over 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, requiring advanced techniques to keep microscopic particles out of sensitive equipment.

The cleanroom facility supports ATIC and Masdar Institute’s larger research initiatives, including Twin Labs, the ATIC-SRC Center of Excellence for Energy Efficient Electronic Systems, and broader research towards Minimum Energy Electronic Systems.

Backed by ATIC and the State of Saxony, Germany, and hosted jointly by Masdar Institute and Technische Universität Dresden, Twin Labs has already achieved marked progress towards researching three-dimensional chip stacking, a potentially faster and more energy efficient semiconductor technology. According to some analysts, 3D architecture has the potential to reduce semiconductor power consumption by upwards of 60% when compared to today’s 2D layouts.

Launched in April of this year and hosted jointly at Masdar Institute and Khalifa University, ACE4S focuses on energy efficient devices with research in energy harvesting, power management, sensor technologies, and wireless communications networks. Within the first three years, ACE4S will seek to produce integrated prototypes with healthcare applications as well as knowledge and research relevant to safety and security, aerospace, water quality and the environment. These innovations will contribute towards what Global Information Inc. predicts to be an AED 24 billion bio-MEMS market by 2018.

Mike Tiner, the manager of fabrication and microscopy facilities at Masdar Institute, said: “With any semiconductor plant, you have this need for people to work in it and they need to be very highly skilled. When you come to a place like the UAE, we don’t have that base of knowledge so we have to figure out how to operate it, this is what this facility does.

“On the one hand it is important for research, on the other hand it is a chance for big innovation, it will take the industry to the next level.”

Countries such as the UAE have taken to investing in advanced technologies to diversify economies away from oil. The semiconductor industry is one such example for this country through its investment in GlobalFoundries. Atic has plans to open a foundry in Abu Dhabi.

The UAE in general has a labor shortage and has had to invest in capital-intensive industries, according to Fred Moavenzadeh, the president of the Masdar Institute. “The UAE has been moving aggressively towards nano technology and aerospace,” he said.

“These are very advanced technology and capital-intensive industries, unlike China and Korea where they prefer labor-intensive technologies.”

There are 85 people at the Masdar Institute certified to use the new facility. The institute has 14 active projects ranging from making organic solar cells to more advanced research involving the use of new materials. There are a further 20 projects on the facility’s waiting list.

JM Coull Begins Cleanroom Construction and Renovations for ASML

JM Coull has begun cleanroom construction and façade improvements for ASML at their office building in Wilton, CT. JMC is working with H&R Design to build a 4,500-square-foot EUV test cleanroom, an addition to the south side of ASML’s facility, as well as replace the building’s façade. The construction will take place over a ten month period and will not disturb ASML’s normal operations for the duration of the project.

ASML is the world's leading provider of lithography systems for the semiconductor industry, manufacturing complex machines that are critical to the production of integrated circuits or chips. Headquartered in Veldhoven, the Netherlands, ASML is traded on Euronext Amsterdam and NASDAQ under the symbol ASML.

JM Coull is a design-build, construction management and general contracting firm, specializing in renovations and new construction for manufacturing, advanced technology, education, healthcare and life science customers. The company has extensive expertise in research and development and laboratories and operates throughout New England from its headquarters in Maynard, Mass.

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