SEMICONDUCTOR INDUSTRY
UPDATE
June 2018
McIlvaine Company
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Opto Tech, Tyntek Expanding Si-Based Sensor Chip
Capacities
LED chip makers Opto Tech and Tyntek are expanding production capacities for
Si-base sensor chips and will bring additional capacities into operation in July
and September 2018 respectively, according to the companies.
Among Taiwan-based LED chip makers, Opto Tech and Tyntek stepped into production
of Si-based sensor chips years ago, with Tyntek acquiring manufacturing
equipment from LED epitaxial wafer and chip maker Epistar.
For sensors used in biometrics, autonomous driving, AI (artificial intelligence)
and industrial automation, VCSEL (vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser) chips
or infrared LED chips are used as signal transmitters, while Si-based sensor
chips are used as signal receivers.
In view of growing demand for Si-based sensor chips, Opto Tech expanded
production capacity by 10% in the second half of 2017 and is further expanding
the capacity by 20% with investment of NT$400 million (US$13.4 million). Opto
Tech supplies Si-based sensor chips mainly for use in smartwatches or wrist
bands to measure heart rates and SpO2 and expects the revenue proportion for
Si-based sensor chips to rise from 48% in the first quarter of 2018 to over 50%
in the second half of the year.
Tyntek has a factory with monthly production capacity of 60,000 5-inch Si-based
epitaxial wafers for making sensor chips and is constructing another with
initial monthly capacity of 30,000 6-inch epitaxial wafers. Currently, the
company has 50% of consolidated revenues from Si-based sensor chips, 45% from
LED chips and 5% from receiver devices used in fiber-optic communication.
Chengdu CEC Panda Display Expanding TV Panel
Output
As one of the major IT hubs in China, Chengdu, the capital city of the
southwestern province of Sichuan, is actively developing a mega complex in the
suburban Shuangliu District to cluster mainly semiconductor players and some
prospective investors in other IT fields, seeking to accelerate strategic
developments of IC designs, software design tools and smart manufacturing.
Revenues from the complex are estimated to reach CNY20 billion (US$3.11 billion)
by 2020 and break CNY100 billion by 2030, according to Chengdu Xingu Industrial
Parks Development.
Among the companies there is Chengdu CEC Panda Display Technology, a newcomer to
China's LCD panel industry but touted as the country's most successful homegrown
panel development project.
The company spent only 16 months completing the construction of its 8.6G panel
line, from groundbreaking in September 2016 to successful trial production in
January 2018, compared to 18-20 months required by other peer makers, according
to Li Xiangfeng, director of the firm's production process. He revealed that the
young company has a young workforce, with the average age of all its employees
reaching only 26.8.
LCD displays will remain the market mainstream within the next five years, with
4K displays already becoming standard screens for midrange to high-end TVs and
8K TVs to be available soon, Lee commented, adding that 8K panels are already on
his company's production agenda for 2018.
With a total investment cost of CNY28 billion, the plant mainly adopts 8.6G
Nikon lithography machines and applies five-mask metal oxide processing
technology in manufacturing 4K, 8K IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) TV panels,
according to Lee.
Lee continued that his plant now mainly manufactures large-size IGZO TV panels,
available in 50-inch, 58-inch, 65-inch and 68-inch specs, and part of its
capacity may be also arranged for producing 32-inch and 39-inch LCD monitor
panels, depending on customer demand. He disclosed that the plant is also likely
to roll out panels sized 98-inch or over 100-inch by the end of 2018.
As China's first fully homegrown 8.6G metal oxide LCD panel line, the plant
features 15-20 smart manufacturing systems that can provide real-time data
analysis concerning equipment usage conditions to help boost production
efficiency and yield rates, Lee stressed.
Lee revealed that in its first-phase development, the plant's monthly production
capacity will reach 60,000 pieces in September 2018, and the second-stage
development will see trial production begin in August, with a combined monthly
capacity of 120,000 panels to be achieved in the first quarter of 2019 at the
earliest.
At the moment, Chengdu CEC Panda Display Technology is teaming up with Sichuan
University of Electronic Science and Technology to set up a display technology
exchange platform. The platform will allow major panel makers to exchange and
share information on the latest tech innovations, which can then be incorporated
into commercial production - a joint effort that can upgrade the development and
competitiveness of China's LCD panel industry, according to Lee.
Intel Investing in Israeli Plant
Kiryat Gat fab to see $5 billion investment over two years to go from 22 to 10nm
Intel Corporation plans to invest $5 billion over the next two years to upgrade
its fab in Kiryat Gat in Israel from 22nm to 10nm technology.
There was no official announcement from Intel, but Israel’s ministry of finance
said in a statement that approval is expected from Israel’s government bodies in
weeks and that the new plant will employ an additional 250 people. Intel had
apparently considered several possible expansion sites but, after two years of
discussion with Israel’s finance ministry, decided to expand its site in the
country.
Intel has been a major employer in Israel, starting with five employees in Haifa
in 1974, and has invested about $11 billion since then. Now the company employs
10,000 people in the country directly, with 60% of employees in research and
development.
At its recent venture capital arm’s global summit in California, Intel Capital’s
Yair Shoham was reported to be considering several significant investments in
Israel this year, having already invested in six companies in 2018. It is
thought to have invested some $375 million in about 80 Israeli startups since
1997 and had 28 exits, including Anobit, the flash memory controller company
sold to Apple in 2012. This month, Intel Capital participated in a $10 million
round led by MegaChips in Israeli Gfast chipset supplier Sckipio Technologies. [Gfast
is an ultrafast broadband technology, which is anything over 100 Mbps].
Infineon Invests in New
300mm Capabilities
Aiming to address growing demand for power semiconductors, Infineon Technologies
AG announced an investment of around €1.6 billion (about $1.88 billion) over six
years on a new 645,600 sq. ft. (60,000-square-meter) fab.
The fully automated 300-mm fab will be located in Villach, Austria, alongside
Infineon's existing production facility. It is expected to begin production in
2021.
Reinhard Ploss, Infineon's CEO, said through a statement that global megatrends
such as climate change, demographic change and increasing digitization are
driving an increase in demand for power semiconductors. "Electric vehicles,
connected and battery-powered devices, data centers or power generation from
renewable sources require efficient and reliable power semiconductors," Ploss
said.
Villach is Infineon's competence center for power semiconductors. Manufacturing
of power semiconductors on 300-millimeter wafers was developed in Villach and
then expanded into another fab in Dresden, Infineon's main location for
Infineon's front-end wafer processing.
Infineon said the new Villach fab would create about 400 new jobs and begin
construction in the first half of next year.
Infineon is the world's largest provider of power semiconductors with global
market share of about 18.5 percent, according to market research firm IHS Markit.
Taiwan-based VCSEL application solutions provider HLJ Technology has decided to
invest NT$2.7 billion (US$90.08 million) to build a 6-inc epi wafer fab at its
plant complex in northern Taiwan to better cash in on huge VCSEL application
market potentials by integrating relevant epi chip design, fabrication,
packaging and testing operations, according to company sources.
The company will issue 16 million new shares at a unit price of NT$90 to raise
NT$1.44 billion in funds to support the first-stage land lot and equipment
procurements, with the new plant slated to start volume production in late first
half of 2019, the sources said.
In 2017, HLJ successfully tapped into the supply chain of AirPods as the sole
supplier of VCSEL components needed for Apple's wireless earphones, through the
assistance of Austria-based sensor maker AMS, now one of its four major
shareholders and a supply partner for iPhone X 3D sensors, industry sources
said.
At the moment, HLJ mainly relies on its 4-inch fab to process low-power VCSEL
devices for AirPods, and its planned 6-inch fab will focus on production of
high-power VCSEL components needed in a wide variety of applications including
notebooks, robots, AI, big data, AR/VR, car-use LiDAR and ADAS, HDMI and
security surveillance, the industry sources said.
HLJ also sees great market potential for VCSEL devices applied to the 3D sensors
for smartphones and mobile devices, as the 3D sensor market sales are estimated
to skyrocket from US$1.5 billion in 2017 to US$14 billion in 2020 for a CAGR of
up to 209%. By leveraging the advantage of integrated operations at its new
plant, the company believes that it can benefit more than competitors from the
market growth.
Toshiba Memory to Build New Fab
Toshiba Memory (TMC) announced recently it had decided to start constructing a
new fab for BiCS FLASH, the company's proprietary 3D flash memory, in Kitakami
(Iwate prefecture, Japan) in July 2018.
TMC selected Kitakami City as the next location to expand its operations in
September 2017, and has started preparations for construction of the new fab.
Demand for 3D flash memory has been rising on robust demand for enterprise SSDs
for datacenters and servers.
The new fab will be completed in 2019, according to the company. It will
introduce an advanced production system that uses artificial intelligence (AI)
to boost productivity. Decisions on the new fab's equipment investment,
production capacity and production plan will reflect market trends. TMC expects
to continue its joint venture investments based on discussion with Western
Digital in the new facility.
In addition, TMC disclosed that its wholly-owned subsidiary Toshiba Memory Iwate, which was established to manage the start-up and operation of the facility, plans to recruit 370 new graduates during its fiscal 2018.
II-VI Incorporated Opens New
Facility for Epitaxial Wafer Manufacturing
II‐VI Incorporated, a leading provider of compound semiconductor epitaxial
wafers, today announced the opening of its new high tech compound semiconductor
material center of excellence in Champaign, Illinois.
This represents a significant milestone in II-VI’s ongoing investment in its
manufacturing footprint to ramp up production capacity of high performance
compound semiconductor epitaxial wafers. These products serve growing markets
and are at the core of 3D sensing, optical networking, wireless communications
and power electronics. Since the groundbreaking for this expansion, in November
2016, II-VI continues to actively recruit managers, engineers and technicians to
join its experienced team.
“On behalf of II-VI, I would like to
express my thanks to the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity
for its ongoing support and unwavering commitment to our success,” said Quesnell
Hartmann, General Manager and co-founder of II-VI EpiWorks. “The completion of
this phase in our expansion provides us with the critical infrastructure to
scale our production, advance our technology, and enable us to serve the rapidly
growing demand from our global customer base.”
“II-VI and the State of Illinois have formed a strong partnership, sharing a
vision that businesses with leading edge technology and advanced manufacturing
capabilities are the most competitive over the long-term,” said Dr. Chuck
Mattera, President and CEO, II-VI Incorporated. “With support from Illinois, we
expect to continue to invest in this Champaign facility, by adding
state-of-the-art manufacturing capacity, improving process capabilities,
broadening the product portfolio and recruiting and developing a lot of talent
to fill the anticipated growth in jobs and opportunities for career growth.”
II-VI develops and manufactures compound semiconductor epitaxial wafers that
enable devices to achieve high bandwidth, power efficiency and reliability.
II-VI’s global compound semiconductor production capabilities include
multi-purposed 6 inch wafer fabs with both epitaxy and device fabrication
capabilities for GaAs, SiC and InP compound semiconductors.
About II-VI Incorporated:
II-VI Incorporated, a global leader in engineered materials and optoelectronic
components, is a vertically integrated manufacturing company that develops
innovative products for diversified applications in the industrial, optical
communications, military, life sciences, semiconductor equipment, and consumer
markets. Headquartered in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, the Company has research and
development, manufacturing, sales, service, and distribution facilities
worldwide. The Company produces a wide variety of application-specific photonic
and electronic materials and components, and deploys them in various forms,
including integrated with advanced software to enable our customers. For more
information, please visit us at www.ii-vi.com.
ON Semiconductor in Expansion Mode
ON celebrated the grand opening of the ON Semiconductor Assembly and Test
facility with a ribbon-cutting on Wednesday May 9, 2018.
ON semiconductor has expanded its manufacturing facility in Rochester, New York
(US). Headquartered in Arizona, ON is a global supplier of high performance,
energy efficient silicon solutions for green electronics.
The New York site develops and manufactures image sensor devices for commercial,
industrial and professional imaging applications, including machine vision,
surveillance, traffic monitoring, medical and scientific imaging and
photography.
Located on a 4.2-acre site with over 260,000 sq. ft. of building space, the
expanded facility supports all four disciplines of the semiconductor business:
wafer fab, wafer probe, assembly, and test and packaging operations for
specialized high-performance CCD and CMOS image sensors.
“Not only is the screen on your smart phone or TV likely inspected with image
sensors manufactured at the Lake Avenue site, but image sensors manufactured at
this facility are also on the surface of Mars, orbiting Jupiter and the Moon,
and used in commercial satellites that monitor the Earth’s surface,” said
Michael Miller, general manager and director of operations at ON Semiconductor.
Miller said this expansion would have not been possible without the support and
grant from Empire State Development and their willingness to partner with ON.
“We owe them a debt of gratitude, thank you Governor Cuomo,” he said.
“Manufacturing is a core competency for ON Semiconductor and the majority of ON
Semiconductor’s manufacturing operations are done internally through the
company’s industry leading cost structure,” said Bill Schromm, executive vice
president and chief operating officer. “This expansion is important to our
company as it significantly increases our assembly capacity at the ON
Semiconductor Rochester location.”
The expansion is due in part to partnerships with local and state officials,
including the Mayor and County Executive, Governor’s office and state officials,
as well as members of Congress. All recognizing the opportunity to grow the
local economy and leverage the unique advantages that Rochester can bring.
ON Semiconductor is focused on energy efficient innovations in an effort to
reduce global energy use. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio of over
80,000 energy efficient power management, analogue, sensors, logic, timing,
connectivity, discrete, SoC and custom devices utilized in, computing, consumer,
industrial, medical and military/aerospace applications.
The expansion plan follows on from the recent acquisition of SensL Technologies
Ltd. Based in Ireland, SensL specializing in Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM),
Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) and LiDAR sensing products for automotive,
medical, industrial and consumer markets.
This acquisition positions ON Semiconductor to extend its market leadership in
automotive sensing applications for ADAS and autonomous driving with expanded
capabilities in imaging, radar and LiDAR.
By combining this acquisition in Ireland with previously acquired radar
technology and design centers in Israel and United Kingdom, ON Semiconductor is
now positioned to provide a comprehensive set of sensor solutions for next
generation highly autonomous vehicles and to solidify its position as a leader
in image sensing and ultrasonic park assistance.
ON Semiconductor has also announced that in the second half of 2018 it plans to
introduce samples to the market which incorporate technology from the radar
assets acquired in 2017.
The company employs 300,000 staff and operates manufacturing sites in Belgium,
Canada, China, Czechia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, United States and
Vietnam
ON Semiconductor Corporation (NASDAQ: ON), driving energy efficient innovations,
is excited to announce the expansion of their manufacturing facility in
Rochester, New York. The site develops and manufactures image sensor devices for
commercial, industrial and professional imaging applications, including machine
vision, surveillance, traffic monitoring, medical and scientific imaging, and
photography.
Infineon to Build New
Chip Plant in Austria
Infineon Technologies AG IFNNY is set to build a new chip production house at
Villach, Austria. The investment worth €1.6 billion is spread over a time period
of six years.
The construction is likely to commence around the first half of 2019. The
company anticipates beginning production of 300-millimeter (mm) wafer from 2021
and the headcount is projected to increase by approximately 400.
Presently, Infineon produces the 300-mm chips at its Dresden location.
Infineon anticipates the new factory to increase revenue churn by €1.8 billion a
year, considering full capacity utilization. Currently, the company anticipates
production capacities "to be fully utilized by 2021."
Abu Dhabi Leaders Visit Fab 8
Facility
Semiconductor manufacturer GlobalFoundries opened its doors to Fab8 to host a
delegation of leaders from the United Arab Emirates, where the company is
rooted.
GlobalFoundries calls its Saratoga County facility Fab 8. The company is owned
by Mubadala Investment Company, of which the government of Abu Dhabi in the
United Arab Emirates is the sole shareholder.
GlobalFoundries is just a portion of Mubadala’s investments in the U.S.
Mubadala began working with New York State in 2009 when GlobalFoundries was
launched as a joint venture with semiconductor company AMD.
Since the opening of Fab 8 in Malta, GlobalFoundries has acquired IBM’s chip
manufacturing facilities in East Fishkill in Westchester County and Essex
Junction, Vermont.
Al Mubarak says no other country has been “more critical” to the development of
UAE than the U.S. He highlighted trade data between the two countries in 2017.
“The United States and UAE conducted $24.3 billion in total bilateral trade. $20
billion of it was U.S. exports. Hopefully the White House will hear that too,”
said Al Mubarak.
Al Mubarak is set to visit with officials in Washington soon.
UAE Ambassador to the United States Yousef Al Otaiba acknowledged some people
may be surprised that a small Middle Eastern country would be driving innovation
in advanced technology.
“And unfortunately the headlines usually associated with our part of the world
is negative: it’s about conflict, it’s about destruction, and it’s about
violence. But in the UAE, we’re trying to build a different, more positive and
hopeful future,” said Al Otaiba.
The ambassador touched on a common theme during the event: partnership.
“We know that a key part of our innovative vision for the future will be working
with partners like the United States,” said Al Otaiba.
Dr. Tom Caulfield, who previously served as general manager of the Fab 8
facility, was recently promoted to CEO of GlobalFoundries.
“I think Fab 8 is a particular good example of partnership. It’s here today
because of great vision in the State of New York to create a technology center
on semiconductors, CNSE, decades ago,” said Caulfield. “And through independent
administrations it always never lost its true north: that investments in
technology have big paybacks.”
GlobalFoundries says the state’s investment has led to the creation of more than
3,000 jobs and $12 billion in capital expenditures. Of that, New York State has
invested more than $1 billion.
Among the invited guests were local lawmakers, state and municipal government
officials, and state and local educational leaders.
Democratic New York Congressman Paul Tonko said when he speaks about
GlobalFoundries and the Capital Region on the House floor, he is the envy of the
chamber.
“We talk about this tremendous growth, the chip manufacturing that is
record-setting in its numbers and its statistics, that is something to really
feel proud about,” said Tonko.
GlobalFoundries is a leading manufacturer of what’s known as 14 nanometer
technology to power high-tech devices. Fab 8 will soon begin manufacturing
next-generation 7 nanometer technology, says new general manager Ron Sampson.
“We’re yielding the technology already, so we’re getting it ready for
manufacturing right now,” said Sampson. “Our intent is to have it manufacturing
with our first products going into manufacturing later this year.”
EV Group (EVG) has announced that it has started construction work for the next
expansion phase of its corporate headquarters in St. Florian, Austria. The new,
state-of-the-art building will house EVG's Manufacturing III facility, which
will more than double the floor space for the final assembly of EVG's systems
supporting semiconductor wafer bonding and lithography equipment requirements
for a global manufacturing base.
"With our innovative manufacturing solutions for the high-tech industry as well
as new biomedical applications, we operate in very dynamic markets with great
future prospects," stated Dr. Werner Thallner, executive operations and
financial director at EV Group. "In light of the high capacity utilization in
all areas of our existing facilities, as well as the positive market outlook, we
decided to implement our plans for building our Manufacturing III facility this
year. This will support our long-term growth targets at our corporate
headquarters."
EVG's new Manufacturing III building, adjacent to its new test room site that
was opened a few months ago, will be built next to the River Inn. The
ultramodern building will provide approximately 51,648 sq. ft. (4,800 square
meters) of additional space in total, which will benefit not only manufacturing
but also other departments. In addition to an expansion of warehouse space, a
new delivery area with a dedicated packaging site designed for cleanroom
equipment will be created, along with an airfreight security zone and new truck
loading docks for the shipment of the completed systems to EVG's worldwide
customers.
Construction of the new Manufacturing III building is set to be completed in
early 2019.
TSMC roadmap reveals 7 and 5nm with EUV, projecting 12 million wafers produced
in 2018
Continuing to move fast in multiple directions at once, TSMC announced that it
is in volume production with a 7-nm process and will have a version using
extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography ramping early next year. In addition, it
gave its first timeline for a 5-nm node and announced a half-dozen new packaging
options.
Meanwhile, the foundry is pushing power consumption and leakage down on more
mainstream 22-/12-nm nodes, advancing a laundry list of specialty processes and
rolling out an alphabet soup of embedded memories. At the same time, it is
exploring future transistor structures and materials.
Overall, the Taiwanese giant expects to make 12 million wafers this year with
R&D and capex spending both on the rise. It has even started production of 16-nm
FinFET chips in Nanjing, a big first for China.
The only bad news is that the advantages with the new process nodes are getting
thinner. The new normal for performance gains and power reductions generally
fall in a 10% to 20% range, a reality that makes the new packaging and specialty
processes increasingly important.
TSMC is in volume production of 7-nm chips today with more than 50 tapeouts
expected this year. It’s making CPUs, GPUs, AI accelerators, cryptocurrency
mining ASICs, networking, gaming, 5G, and automotive chips.
The node delivers 35% more speed or uses 65% less power and sports a 3x gain in
routed gate density. By contrast, the N7+ node with EUV will only deliver 20%
more density, 10% less power, and apparently no speed gains — and those advances
require use of new standard cells.
TSMC has validated in silicon what it calls foundation IP for N7+. However,
several key blocks will not be ready until late this year or early next year,
including 28–112G serdes, embedded FPGAs, HBM2, and DDR5 interfaces.
Expect 10% to 20% more effort laying out IP for the EUV process, said Cliff Hou,
vice president of R&D for design and technology platforms. “We developed a
utility to migrate IP with incremental effort.”
Fully certified EDA flows for N7+ will be ready by August. Meanwhile, yields of
a test 256-Mbit SRAM at N7+ are as good as yields were for the early 7-nm node,
he said.
Looking ahead, TSMC aims to start risk production of a 5-nm node in the first
half of 2019, focusing on mobile and high-performance computing chips.
Compared to the initial 7 nm without EUV, the 5-nm node promises a 1.8x greater
density than 7 nm. However, it is only expected to reduce power by up to 20% or
raise speeds by about 15%, perhaps 25% using Extremely Low Threshold Voltage
(ELTV), details of which TSMC has not yet provided.
“Without EUV, they can’t deliver the same scaling advantage as past nodes,” said
Mike Demler, an analyst with the Linley Group. “If you look at N7+, they claim
an additional 20% scaling over N7. So EUV is required to get closer to
traditional Moore’s Law scaling. Their N5–N7 scaling just gets worse.”
Taiwan Fab hits 250-W Goal with
EUV
TSMC clearly has a bead on high-volume manufacturing for EUV early next year. It
got systems to sustain production at 250 W for a couple of weeks in April and
aims to hit 300 W next year, a power level needed for volume throughput.
With average daily power levels at 145 W, the foundry has a ways to go, but
“throughput is on track to meet production needs,” said Y.J. Mii, vice president
of R&D for technology development.
Besides “significant progress on power and throughput,” Mii reported that resist
dosage is declining toward the foundry’s 1Q19 production goal, though it’s still
about a third too high. The protective pellicle transmits 83% of EUV light and
should hit 90% next year.
EUV continues to provide much better uniformity of critical dimensions than
immersion steppers, said Mii, showing several examples. The foundry expects to
use EUV on multiple layers in both N7+ and 5-nm nodes and is aggressively
installing NXE3400 systems from ASML.
It appears that TSMC’s EUV plan is within six months of the production schedule
of Samsung, which has said that it will be in production this year. The South
Korean giant plans its own event later this month, where it will provide an
update on its progress.
The gap is not likely enough to get large-volume customers such as Apple or
Qualcomm to switch suppliers. In the long term, a lead of a few months will be
insignificant, said G. Dan Hutcheson, chief executive of market watcher VLSI
Research.
Meanwhile, TSMC’s 5-nm node is still embryonic with a version 0.5 EDA flow
targeted for June release and a v0.5 design kit in July. Many IP blocks won’t be
validated until next year, including PCIe Gen 4, DDR4, and USB 3.1 interfaces.
By the end of 2019, the foundry aims to triple to 1.1 million wafers/year its
production on 10-/7-nm nodes. It’s latest fab complex 18 is under construction
in Taiwan now and aims to start 5-nm production in 2020.
Now that TSMC has established its 2.5-D CoWoS package in GPUs and other
processors and its wafer-level fan-out InFO in smartphone chips, it is expanding
both offerings and adding others.
CoWoS chips will have options for silicon interposers up to twice a reticle’s
size, apparently stitched in the field, starting early next year. Versions with
130-micron bump pitch will be qualified this year.
The InFO technique is getting four cousins. Info-MS, for memory substrate, packs
an SoC and HBM on a 1x reticle substrate with a 2 x 2-micron redistribution
layer and will be qualified in September.
InFO-oS has a backside RDL pitch better matched to DRAM and is ready now. A
multi-stacking option called MUST put one or two chips on top of another larger
one linked through an interposer at the base of the stack.
Finally, InFO-AIP stands for antenna-in-package, sporting a 10% smaller form
factor and 40% higher gain. It targets designs such as front-end modules for 5G
basebands.
“InFO is an important platform,” said Jan Vardaman, a veteran packaging analyst
and president of TechSearch International.
“TSMC’s InFO for baseband/modem package in a PoP with memory is very impressive
— lower profile, smaller form factor, and better performance. InFO on Substrate
is going to be popular because it’s 2-micron lines and spaces will cover a lot
of applications.”
But that’s not all. TSMC introduced two wholly new packaging options.
A wafer-on-wafer pack (WoW) directly bonds up to three dice. It was released
last week, but users need to ensure that their EDA flows support the bonding
technique. It will get EMI support in June.
Finally, the foundry roughly described something that it called
system-on-integrated-chips (SoICs) using less than 10-micron interconnects to
link two dice, but details are still sketchy for the technique to be released
sometime next year. It targets apps from mobile to high-performance computing
and can connect dice made in different nodes, suggesting it may be a form of
system-in-package.
“It used to be ASE leading the way in packaging, but now I’d say TSMC is,” said
one analyst.
The motivations are clear. As the advantages of CMOS scaling diminish, packaging
helps deliver performance, in part through faster memory access. In the last few
years, TSMC, which runs three back-end production lines, won significant
business with Apple in part due to InFO and Xilinx and Nvidia in part with CoWoS.
The new packages “look like the long-promised alternative to the end of Moore’s
Law, but pretty expensive and still with lots of issues,” said Demler of Linley
Group.
Only about a third of TSMC’s business is at advanced nodes such as 28 nm and
beyond. Thus, the foundry discussed advances in a laundry list of specialty
processes as well as advances a step or two back from the bleeding edge.
For example, it is developing ultra-low-power and ultra-low-leakage versions of
its 22-nm planar and 12-nm FinFET nodes. They will compete with FD-SOI processes
ramping at Globalfoundries and Samsung.
The new 22-nm versions use 28-nm design rules and deliver a 10% optical shrink
and speed gain or can reduce power 20%. The process and related IP will be ready
by the end of the year with target apps including advanced microcontrollers,
IoT, and 5G millimeter-wave chips.
The 12-nm versions use FinFETs and more compact cell libraries to deliver about
16% more speed than TSMC’s 16FFC. High-speed serdes are among the few pieces of
IP that won’t be ready until next year.
In memories, a 40-nm resistive RAM is now ready as an alternative to flash for
IoT chips. It adds just two mask layers and sports 10 years of retention and
support for 10,000 cycles.
A 22-nm embedded MRAM will debut this year that’s faster and has longer
retention than flash. It targets automotive, mobile, and high-performance
designs with good yields on test chips so far.
Separately, TSMC is delivering smaller form factors for MEMS. It expects
GaN-on-silicon with 10-V and 650-V driver integration in the fall and 100-V
D-HEMT qualified next year for cellular power amps.
In addition, the foundry has qualified EDA flows and IP for its 16FFC process
for automotive. It plans to have a 7-nm automotive process ready by the end of
the year, though full certification will take until 2Q19.
As icing on the cake, TSMC announced a milestone in China, sketched out its
long-term research, and gave an update on its use of machine learning for
process automation.
The foundry is now producing 16-nm FinFET chips in its new Nanjing fab several
months earlier than planned. The first phase in place includes a spaceship-like
cafeteria, tubular office building, and 20,000-wafers/month fab that rivals
Apple’s new headquarters in flashy design, though not scale. A second phase
eventually will double production.
Meanwhile, TSMC researchers are progressing on designs of stacked nanowires as
nanosheets for a next-generation transistor suitable for work at 2 nm and
beyond. The design sports better electrostatics than FinFETs and can be
optimized for power and performance by adjusting device width.
The foundry sees germanium as a strong candidate to replace silicon, providing
lower power at the same speed. It achieved a record-low contact resistance using
the material in a CMOS-compatible dielectric.
TSMC is exploring a variety of 2D back-end materials including molybdenum
disulfide for their atomically smooth surfaces. They also are examining novel
ways to enlarge copper grains to reduce resistance in interconnects. In
addition, they are working on a selective dielectric-on-dielectric deposition
process to enable self-aligning of copper vias.
In memories, they are exploring embedded MRAM for use beyond the 22-nm node,
possibly with alternative magnetic structures. For embedded ReRAM beyond 40 nm,
high-density crossbars are seen as an energy-efficient approach, especially for
AI accelerators.
In terms of automation, TSMC is embracing machine learning to systematically
analyze its wealth of wafer-processing data. It already tunes process recipes
for specific tools and products. It also tracks and classifies process
variations in an effort to automate the discovery of whether a problem is in a
tool, process, or material.
The company has a library of more than 50,000 process recipes and tens of
millions of control charts. Just how TSMC is applying machine learning to its
automation tasks and with what products was unclear — no doubt, still something
of a work in progress, perhaps with some secret sauce.
McIlvaine Company
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Tel:
847-784-0012; Fax:
847-784-0061
E-mail:
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