Applied Materials

At SEMICON West 2020, the Honorable Al Gore, former U.S. Vice President and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize for environmental activism, commented on the world being in the midst of a “sustainability revolution.” Just what did he mean by that, and why bring that message to us? The answer is that he believes the digital transformation wields the magnitude of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, but with the exponential speed that the semiconductor industry created and enabled. Ok, that would put him in the right place… SEMICON West.Among a rich lineup of speakers to mark the 50th anniversary of the event – and 50 years of the semiconductor industry facilitating the innovation of the Information Age -- Gore joined other icons in their fields who graced the virtual stage for our featured keynotes. Each analyzed how microchip advances are critical to solving some of the world’s greatest challenges.As host of the conference, I had the privilege of introducing Gore; Gary Dickerson, President and CEO of Applied Materials; and, Dr. John Kelly III, Executive Vice President and Director of IBM Research, along with other renowned speakers. Their insights seemed especially timely for how our global supply chain can help to build a more sustainable future. Following are a few of the highlights from their discussions. Al Gore – The Planet Faces Existential CrisisIn his keynote conversation with Greenbiz editorial director Heather Clancy kicking off SEMICON West 2020, Gore emphasized that digital technology advances – and in particular microchip innovation – provide the greatest opportunities to overcome the world’s most epic challenges. Chip breakthroughs will be the cutting edge of what he called the rapidly growing sustainability revolution to improve energy efficiency, reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, and optimize the performance of renewable energy generated by solar, wind, and electric battery sources.“We face an inflection point as we rely more on data and communications technology, particularly in areas like cloud computing and artificial intelligence,” Gore said. “Industry is aware of this and working on it, but this meeting (SEMICON West 2020) with your present leadership marks a real turning point. It’s something to be proud of, something to be celebrated. It’s what gives me hope.”Citing Moore’s Law and enormous strides made in chip efficiency and effectiveness, Gore said that within two years smart chips will make everything from solar panels and batteries to renewable energy plants and electric vehicles to be both cost- and performance-competitive with traditional energy sources. Afterwards, renewable energy will be more attractive. Gore urged the energy-intensive semiconductor industry to shift to more renewable power sources for manufacturing. To meet this challenge, Gore encouraged the industry to embrace strategies for “step changes”: First, collaborate and share best practices more transparently across the entire microelectronics value chain. Examples already abound where “cutting-edge apps, AI, and deep learning reduced data server energy use significantly without hardware changes,” he said. Second, reduce electricity required to manufacture smarter and smaller semiconductors. Gore encouraged “all of the equipment manufacturers to work together to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions in manufacturing these advanced semiconductors.” Third, follow the lead of a growing number of companies that “continue decarbonizing the power supply on which data centers operate,” he said. Fourth, work with government through the Science Based Target Initiative, which sets decarbonization limits that keep global temperatures no more than two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Finally, rely on “diversity of thought” and “collective thinking” when innovating for the digital future. Research and experience prove that different points of view lead to better decisions. The technology industry has made progress in workforce diversity, but more can be done, Gore said. This last point plays to our collaborative strengths as SEMI members and an industry. “It is just unbearable to imagine a future generation living with the kinds of consequences scientists tell us would ensue if we don’t heed their warnings and solve this crisis,” Gore said, drawing parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic. “We have to accept the situation and make sure we do everything we can. I am inspired by this industry’s leadership, innovation, and spirit to rise to the challenge and make a difference.”Gary Dickerson – Making Possible A Better FutureTo ensure another 50 years of accelerating growth and innovation, today’s semiconductor leaders must share a deep commitment to a more sustainable and just supply chain industrywide.“The first thing we need to do is decouple our growth from environmental impacts,” Dickerson said in his keynote. “Our responsibility as leaders is to leave the world a better place.”Dickerson said that while he firmly believes the explosion of processing and storage data has “the potential to change the world,” the downside is that it also has the potential to rapidly expand our industry’s carbon footprint. Without dramatic change, electrical usage will continue to rise as machines generate and consume more data, compute performance progresses, and workloads from the edge to the cloud grow.“It will be impossible to create neural networks (using AI) with the rate of today’s power consumption,” Dickerson said, noting that more improvements must be made in the performance and efficiency of semiconductor devices, architectures, structures, materials, and advanced packaging.Dickerson urged the electronics ecosystem to “permanently think and act differently” by breaking down communication barriers among systems integrators, equipment suppliers, design and manufacturing service providers, and other industry players. Sharing learnings and best practices will be vital to this change, he said. Dickerson unveiled SuCCESS2030 (Supply Chain Certification for Environmental and Social Sustainability) – Applied Materials’ 10-year roadmap for creating a more sustainable supply chain – during his talk. Under the SuCCESS2030 initiative, Applied Materials will hold its suppliers to the company’s own high standards for committing to renewable energy and workforce diversity by setting targets such as: Reducing supply chain carbon emissions 15 percent in four years by relying more on intermodal shipping than air freight Transitioning the supply chain to recycled content packaging, with a target of 80 percent by the end of 2023 Eliminating phosphate-based, pre-treatment of metal surfaces by 2024 Working with trade associations like SEMI to develop diversity and inclusion strategies to increase underrepresented minorities in the workplace Dickerson said that deeper and more open partnerships between Applied Materials and its customers and suppliers have led to a number of promising outcomes. Examples include hardware and software upgrades, product and service optimizations, and improvements in chip architectures that increased throughput density for higher system performance while decreasing power and chemical consumption, costs, and space requirements. What’s more, Applied Materials recently introduced its Selective Tungsten Process Technology, which uses new materials, atomic-level designs, and ultra-clean rooms to improve the performance of interconnected transistors while lowering power consumption.Dickerson said the COVID-19 pandemic has awakened the world to the power of digital technologies that make it possible to communicate, collaborate, and share data across the globe while sheltering in place. “When I think of the world’s grand challenges, it’s clear the semiconductor industry has a critical role to play,” Dickerson said. “I strongly believe we’re in a position to shape the future and leave the world a better place.”John E. Kelly III – 50 Years That Changed The World … And We’re Just Getting Started During the past half century, semiconductors have given rise to essentially every major technology advance, Kelly said in his keynote. Microchip innovation has played a central role in rocketing humans to the moon, simulating nuclear weapons on a supercomputer, connecting people to nearly everything via mobile devices, and keeping people alive with pacemakers and other electronic medical devices.The strides in innovation have been staggering. In 1970, a semiconductor chip featured a few thousand components. Today, that number stands at 50 billion. Breakthroughs in everything from materials and chemicals to polishing, processes and interconnectivity have driven gains in power-efficiency and performance while reducing chip size.Moore’s Law is far from dead. Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Kelly said, semiconductor innovation today is not at “the beginning of the end, but at the end of the beginning, and the best is yet to come – driven by extreme collaboration and extreme innovation to solve the world’s biggest challenges.”Kelly said he believes technology is the only answer to the onslaught of grand challenges confronting societies and people today, including air and water pollution, climate change, diminishing natural resources, storm-related disasters, food supply shortages, and the COVID-19 pandemic.Kelly lamented that the world’s response to COVID-19 illustrates that “not much has changed” since the Spanish Flu crisis a century ago. The same technology – masks – remains the primary defense. “I think if we had used digital technologies and computer modeling earlier on, we could have detected the spread of this flu” to minimize its impact, Kelly said.Today’s computer modeling and analytics capabilities aren’t quite ready yet to tackle such complex problems as pandemics, global warming, or water contamination. However, Kelly said, several game-changing technologies – all powered by semiconductors – are emerging as promising answers to our most daunting challenges.“It’s all about the data, and artificial intelligence is the way forward – it’s analytics on steroids, and many new devices will be required to drive AI at the scale of these problems,” Kelly said. “The second technology revolves around not just cloud computing but edge computing and cloud at the edge. Data will be generated in enormous amounts at the edge, which is where we will need to store and compute the data. The next is Quantum Computing. Frankly, we do not have enough computing power yet to look at some of the biggest challenges we have.”All these advances will present new challenges for the semiconductor industry, such as developing new materials, new chip architectures and new mapping structures for AI-embedded devices to reach their full potential.With many of these disruptive innovations too large for any company to solve singlehandedly, Kelly advised industry players to form more “radical partnerships.”“Extreme collaboration and extreme innovation will drive solutions to all these world challenges,” Kelly said. “The best is yet to come.”Radical partnerships… Sustainable revolutions… Extreme innovation… It’s been 50 years of SEMICON West, but it sounds like we’re just getting the real magic started. Like John Kelly said and the other keynoters emphasized, the best is yet to come.Dave Anderson is president of SEMI Americas.

What do you do when much of the U.S. is under lockdown and university students want insights into career opportunities in the microelectronics industry including how to secure jobs?Go virtual.More than 100 students from 30 universities hopped online recently to attend Find Your Future in Microelectronics, the SEMI Foundation’s first webinar. The students learned about the industry’s impact on the future of tech and available career paths and discovered how to take advantage of the Foundation’s university programs. They also submitted their resumes as part of joining SEMI’s student fellow network in hopes of engaging with employers and exploring available job opportunities.And if the students’ questions were a telling sign of their engagement, the event showed that they were fully tuned in. Tim Brosnihan, executive director of the MEMS Sensors Industry Group (MSIG), Erika Hansen, an Applied Materials process engineer, and Cristina Sandoval, the event coordinator and moderator, fielded a whopping 65 questions, many of them about job opportunities, career paths and suggested courses of study. A sample of the questions asked: Q: Is the industry still hiring during these uncertain times?A: Yes! The microelectronics industry is growing and will continue to grow over the next 10 years. There are many job opportunities to be had in the industry and many of our member companies are hiring.Q: What kind of degrees does the microelectronics industry look for?A: Generally, the industry primarily hires graduates with STEM degrees. Chemical, electrical, nano, mechanical, and materials engineering are some of the top majors the industry hires from along with chemistry, physics, and mathematic degrees. That being said, the industry needs talent from all majors. That includes business, finance, human resources and marketing.Q: How can I get connected to the opportunities provided by SEMI?A: You can sign up to connect to our employers and opportunities at www.semi.org/join-edu. Once you submit your information, you will be kept up to date on the latest events and opportunities offered by SEMI and our member companies.Q: Any advice on what to do if your offer has been rescinded?A: Don’t limit yourself when it comes to opportunities. If your offer has been rescinded, don’t give up! Share your situation with your LinkedIn network, an invaluable resource full of contacts that can help you learn about job opportunities. You never know what you will love once you enter the workforce, so keep yourself open and don’t limit the positions or fields that you interview for. Rescinding an offer is always a very difficult decision for an organization, so make sure that you exit the relationship positively. You never know who you will cross paths in the future.Erika delved into the day in the life of an engineer and advised students on ways to find jobs in our industry. Students interacted with Erika, eager to learn how she balanced customer needs with working in the lab. She said she enjoys that duality because it continues to challenge her, allowing her to grow her abilities as a professional.When it comes to breaking into the industry, working in college or through internships and direct-hire opportunities after graduating are good ways to do so. And the students can get their feet in the door with degrees at various levels and across a wide range of disciplines. There is no set formula for success. Learners, she said, will find a place in the industry.With workforce development a key industry initiative, the SEMI Foundation will be rolling out more virtual programs and events to help keep university students and the microelectronics industry connected. Look for details on a virtual job fair we’re planning.We look forward to seeing you online!Shari Liss is executive director of the SEMI Foundation. Shari can be reached at [email protected].

Once an unpopular career destination for university graduates in Korea, the semiconductor industry has been a plum target since the rise of Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix as global leaders and key growth engines for the Korean economy. The industry’s outsize role in innovation of cutting-edge technologies and applications such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and autonomous driving has added to the appeal.The draw of a career in chip manufacturing is even stronger when new graduates from Korean universities consider the semiconductor industry’s rapid growth of 22.2% in 2017 and 15.5% in 2018, according to VLSI Research. Yet, even before earning their degrees, many students are unclear about steps they need to take to prepare for a career in the industry and the type of work available to them.These questions and concerns were on the top of the minds of 250 students who gathered at COEX in Seoul in mid-November for SEMI Campus Outreach, a half day of career insights from global chip companies including Lam Research, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, and KLA along with leading semiconductor companies in Korea such as SEMES, EO technics, JUSUNG ENGINEERING, DONGJIN SEMICHEM, PSK and Wonik IPS. Keynote - Inhak Harry Suh, CEO, Lam Research Korea 250 students gathered at Campus Outreach Campus Outreach keynote speaker Inhak Harry Suh, CEO of Lam Research Korea, stressed that talented new graduates hold the key to leading the semiconductor industry into the Industry 4.0 era and the next phase of growth. He urged the students to look for a company that treats its employees with respect and fairness and to enjoy their work. Joining the executives in inspiring the students, field and service engineers highlighted the semiconductor industry’s strong growth potential, described their job responsibilities and the skills students need to develop to thrive, and offered guidance on subjects to study in school to best prepare students for jobs in the industry. On the recruiting side, human resources representatives at the event provided overviews of their companies and skills they’re looking for as they court talent. Campus Outreach sponsors At SEMICON Korea 2020 – Feb. 5-7 at COEX in Seoul – SEMI will continue to cultivate industry talent at the Workforce Development Pavilion. To help the industry solve its critical talent shortage, the pavilion will offer university students interviews with industry experts and tutorials on semiconductor production as the students explore career paths and are mentored by engineers during the Meet the Experts program. And with a diverse workforce recognized as a competitive advantage, the Women-in-Technology session will gather leaders to discuss how the industry can improve diversity.Jaegwan Shim is a marketing specialist at SEMI Korea.

Famous for its warmth and hospitality, Japan always welcomes visitors from around the world with a gracious embrace. But when is the best season to visit? It depends on the interest of each visitor of course. For Instagrammers, the April cherry blossoms or November autumn leaves – a masterpiece of art with their rainbow gold, red and yellow hues – are ideal for snapping memorable pictures. For foodies, winter delights with tuna, toro sushi and other seafood at their tastiest. Wagyu peaks in richness, too, when the cold weather sets in. For anime and manga enthusiasts, August is definitely the time to visit. That’s when COMIKET, the world’s largest comic market – drawing more than a half million people – takes place in Tokyo. But for people in the electronics value chain, the perfect time to pack their bags and hop a flight to Tokyo is December, when SEMICON Japan – December 11-13 at Tokyo Big Sight – opens its doors with its own form of hospitality.Why should you attend? Here are the five top reasons.Reason 1: Japan is home to leading electronics industry suppliersAccording to VLSI Technology, seven of the top 15 semiconductor equipment suppliers in 2018 are headquartered in Japan, and many Japanese companies also lead backend equipment segments. For decades, Japanese companies have supplied about one third of the equipment for the global semiconductor equipment industry, according to SEMI and the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ). Most of these companies typically set up a booth on the SEMICON Japan show floor to welcome your visit.True, many Japanese suppliers also exhibit at SEMICON shows outside of Japan to meet with customers. But you will find many more engineers, managers and executives of equipment suppliers on their home ground at SEMICON Japan, where suppliers typically debut new equipment. Their booths are also ideal locations for visitors to meet with suppliers to ask questions, exchange opinions and negotiate new business deals.Japanese materials suppliers enjoy an even larger market share, providing about half the materials for the global semiconductor industry. These suppliers dominate in silicon wafers, photomasks, photoresists, sputtering targets, packaging substrates, bonding wires, leadframes, mold compounds and wafer level packaging dielectrics. Unlike equipment suppliers, not all materials companies exhibit. Instead, many participate as speakers and attend to connect with customers.Reason 2: Get ready for the next semiconductor industry upturnA year ago, in late 2018, we expected chip inventory to stabilize by mid-2019, yet the industry still struggles with high inventory overall and low average selling price for memory. The SEMI 2019 equipment billing forecast was lowered accordingly from -4.0 percent growth (2018 year-end forecast) to -18.4 percent (2019 mid-year forecast). However, the two forecasts still predict positive growth in 2020. As SEMICON Japan 2019 is underway, we should be at the beginning of the next upturn.The chart below shows that more wafer process fabs will start construction in 2020 than this year. (Please see article: Nearly $50 Billion in Fabs to Start Construction in 2020.) Custer Consulting Group also pointed to “a resumption in semiconductor chip and capital equipment growth in late 2019 or early 2020.” (Please see article: Semiconductor Industry Upturn by Early 2020?.)With better times ahead, SEMICON Japan 2019 will be an opportune time to exchange opinions with key players across the supply chain and start negotiations for the coming robust recovery of the equipment, components and materials markets.Reason 3: Glimpse the future at SuperTHEATERSEMICON Japan SuperTHEATER will feature industry and technology insights from global visionaries. Asako Eda, Japan’s chief representative officer of the World Economic Forum and the former president of Intel Japan, will open the SuperTHEATER with her keynote on how we live in an era where the fourth industrial revolution, climate change, disparity and geopolitical risks are affecting our lives and with the speed we have never experienced. She will explore the growing role of innovation and social responsibility and how the World Economic Forum is addressing associated challenges. The opening keynote session will also feature Nandan Nayampally, vice president and general manager of the Immersive Experience group at Arm.In all, the SuperTHEATER will host seven keynote forums over three days at SEMICON Japan including: Semiconductor Executive Forum – Terushi Shimizu, representative director and president of Sony Semiconductor Solutions, and Atsuyoshi Koike, president of Western Digital Japan, will discuss their business strategies and prospects. Manufacturing Innovation Summit – Executives from Applied Materials, KLA, Nikon and Tokyo Electron will discuss business and technology issues as well as innovations that will drive growth to 2030. All seven SuperTHEATER programs will be simultaneously translated to English for international audiences.Reason 4: Connect to application communitiesCollaboration across the value chain has never been more important to industry innovation and growth – the very reason SEMI has expanded its reach beyond the semiconductor manufacturing supply chain (equipment and materials) to include design, systems and products.The SEMICON Japan show and conferences will connect you to key application segments of the value chain. The SuperTHEATER will host two SMART transportation forums highlighting the latest developments in autonomous driving and sky transportation (flying cars). In the SMART Applications Zone on the show floor, you’ll find electronics products and technologies showcased for automotive and manufacturing automation as the autonomous driving pavilion highlights emerging technologies that are driving semiconductor innovation opportunities. Reason 5: Learn from disaster and recovery experiencesJapan has taken important disaster recovery lessons from devastating earthquakes over the past three decades, most notably the Kumamoto quake in 2016, the Tohoku temblor in 2011 and the Kobe rattler in 1995. So has the Japan electronics supply chain, including SEMI members. In the Business Continuity Plan (BCP) area at SEMICON Japan 2019, exhibitors including DISCO, Murata Machinery and THK will highlight technologies that can strengthen your preparedness for a disaster and aid in the recovery.On December 12 at the BCP seminar at Japan 2019, Sony Semiconductor Manufacturing, DISCO and Team Engineering Consulting will share their experiences and expertise in mitigating the disaster impacts. (Sony and Disco will present in Japanese.)To get the feel for the magnitude of a major earthquake and how seismic isolation protects against structural damage, be sure to take advantage of THK’s earthquake experience car. Seismic isolation installs isolators – rubber bearings, friction bearings, ball bearings, spring systems or other devices – beneath a building to buffer earthquake vibrations transmitted to structures.More reasons to attend SEMICON JapanAnd of course your visit to Tokyo for SEMICON Japan 2019 wouldn’t be complete without exploring Tokyo and other regions to experience Japan’s exotic culture, cityscapes and cuisine! Here are some resources to give you even more reasons to book a flight to Tokyo: Japan National Tourism Organization Go Tokyo Kyoto Tourism I look forward to seeing you at SEMICON Japan in December!Jim Hamajima is president of SEMI Japan.

The future of the semiconductor industry began to blossom recently in Seoul, South Korea as young, innovative minds teased out secrets to electronics manufacturing and their path to enter the industry one day. Twenty-seven middle schoolers gathered in early August at Yonsei University for SEMI High Tech U (HTU), the worldwide SEMI program that introduces students to science, engineering, technology and math (STEM) careers over three days of hands-on activities and experiential learning. Since 2001, HTU has reached some 8,000 students in nine countries.Semiconductor giants including Applied Materials, KLA, Lam Research and Dongjin Semichem were key teachers as representatives from the companies gave theoretical and practical lectures to pique the students’ interest in STEM educations and careers. The speakers, all experts in microelectronics, surveyed microchips and solar cells, mathematical and scientific experimentation, engineering design and the inner workings of semiconductor manufacturing before the students broke off into teams for lessons largely of their own making. Fine-tuning a wooden contraption – a Statapult – to hurl a ball as far as possible might not sound like the stuff of microelectronics, but it drew on the type of problem-solving skills and creativity the students will need to thrive in the semiconductor industry. Student teams made adjustments to the levers of miniature catapults, then tested the throwing power of the devices. After the ball tosses, they reconvened as a class to share lessons in how they calibrated their catapults for a longer tossing distance and ways they could improve the devices’ performance. Students also took tours of two very different semiconductor manufacturing settings – one virtual and the other real. The young learners donned virtual reality headsets for a simulated walk-through of Applied Materials (the tour was sponsored by the company), then slipped on bunny suits for a tour of Yonsei University's BIT micro fab and a close-up look of how semiconductors are made.But it was the ever-popular Human Calculator game that inspired the greatest thrill as students dove deep into technology. During the exercise, they converted numbers into binary and then traced the digits through a series of gates in an electronic circuit, an exercise requiring careful team communication and concentration to generate the right outputs. The students surprised SEMI Korea employees and instructors, and themselves, by completing the exercise with record speed. Their time: less than two seconds.Human resources managers from sponsor companies were on hand to give the middle school students a head start in their careers with lessons in resume writing and career management. In mock interviews, the students honed their interviewing skills. And in meetings with SEMI High Tech U alumni they learned how their predecessors worked their way into semiconductor industry and their focus of study in college.To be sure, the day was rich in details about working in the microelectronics industry. But did it meet the students’ expectations? In a survey before the event, the more than two dozen students, on average, rated their knowledge of microelectronics at 4.5 on a scale of 1 to 10, a score that jumped to 7.7 after completing HTU. Their favorite module? No surprise: Engineering Design. In this exercise, the students designed a carrier for six 12-ounce beverage cans using only decidedly low-tech materials such as strings, rubber bands and wooden boards. Their innovations were studies in high creativity and ingenuity – just the type of imaginations the semiconductor industry needs. SEMI Korea has offered SEMI HTU since 2011. This year, various other career development programs such as semiconductor manufacturing tutorials and mentoring are planned as SEMI Korea continues to sow the seeds of the next generation of industry workers. Jaegwan Shim is a marketing specialist at SEMI Korea.

In the long unfolding arc of technology innovation, artificial intelligence (AI) looms immense. In its quest to mimic human behavior, the technology touches energy, agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, construction, transportation and nearly every other imaginable industry – a defining role that promises to fast track the fourth Industrial Revolution. And if the industry oracles have it right, AI growth will be nothing shy of explosive.“The gains these days are not incremental,” said Ajit Manocha, SEMI president and CEO, said to a gathering in July of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA) for its Summer Symposium at SEMI’s headquarters in Milpitas. “They are hockey stick – exponential – with AI semiconductors growing in market size from $4 billion this year to $70 billion in 2025.”Manocha left little doubt that AI is remaking the semiconductor industry and, in the process, the world at large. Internet of Things (IoT) and 4G/5G, both key AI enablers, will account for more than 75 percent of device connections by 2025.“Today, 30 billion devices worldwide are connected,” Manocha said, citing an Applied Materials prediction that the number of connected devices globally will grow to between 500 billion and 1 trillion by 2030. Those devices will generate stunning amounts of data collected, interpreted and used to reason, solve problems, learn and plan, leading to the holy grail of autonomous machine behavior.To process this colossal amount of data central to the promise of AI, the industry must break through the limits of a key technology: memory. Memory a Critical AI BottleneckThe challenge for memory starts with performance. Historically, every decade gains in compute performance have outpaced improvements in memory speed by 100 times, and over the past 20 years that gap has grown, said Steven Woo, a fellow and distinguished inventor at Rambus, presenting at the symposium. The upshot is that memory has bottlenecked compute and, in turn, AI performance. The industry has responded with new ways to implement memory systems on AI chips. Each is suited to unique performance requirements and, of course, comes with trade-offs. Among the frontrunners: On-chip memory delivers the highest bandwidth and power efficiency but is limited in capacity. HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) offers both very high memory bandwidth and density. GDDR balances trade-offs among bandwidth, power efficiency, cost and reliability. Since 2012, AI training capability has grown 300,000 times, besting Moore’s law by 25,000 times in doubling every 3.5 months, a blistering pace compared to the 18-month doubling cycle of Moore’s law, Woo said. The staggering improvements have been driven by parallel computing capacity and new application-specific silicon like Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU).These specialized silicon architectures and parallel engines are key to sustaining future gains in compute performance and combatting the slowing of Moore’s Law and the end of power scaling, Woo said. By rethinking the way processors are architected for certain markets, chipmakers can develop dedicated hardware capable of operating with 100 to 1,000 times greater energy efficiency than general purpose processors to overcome another big limiter to scaling compute performance – power.For its part, the memory industry can improve performance by signaling at higher data rates and using stacked architectures like HBM for greater power efficiency and performance, and by bringing compute closer to the data.Memory scaling for AIA key challenge is scaling memory for AI. Demand for better voice, gesture and facial recognition experiences and more immersive virtual reality and augmented reality interactions is tremendous, said Bill En, senior director at AMD, speaking at the symposium. These capabilities require more processing power across both high-performance computing (HPC) for big data analytics and machine learning as it relies on AI and machine intelligence to generate meaningful insights. Emerging machine learning applications include classification and security, medicine, advanced driver assistance, human-aided design, real-time analytics and industrial automation. And with 75 billion IoT-connected devices – all generating data – expected by 2025, there will be no shortage of data to analyze, En said. The wings alone of a new Airbus A380-1000 feature some 10,000 sensors.Mountains of this data are stored in massive data centers on magnetic hard drives, then transferred to DRAM before moving to SRAM within the CPU for the handoff to the compute hardware for analysis.With data growing at an exponential clip, the question is how to make sure all other memory systems can handle the flood of data. AMD’s answer is a chiplet architecture featuring eight smaller chips around the edge that drive the compute and a large chip in the center that doubles the IO interface and memory capability to in turn double chip bandwidth.AMD has also moved from a legacy GDDR5 memory chip configuration to HBM to bring memory bandwidth closer to the GPU for more efficient processing of AI applications. The HBM provides much higher bandwidth while reducing power consumption. Compared to DRAM, AMD’s HBM delivers a much faster data rate and far greater memory density, En said.Over the next decade, look for more performance improvements from multi-chip architectures, innovations in memory technology and integration, aggressive 3D stacking and streamlined system-level interconnects, he said. The industry will also continue to drive performance gains in devices, compute density and power through technology scaling.Michael Hall is a global marketing communications manager at SEMI.

AI vs. energy. Quantum for everyone. Biofabrication of human organs on a mass scale. Slowing advancements from Moore’s law.In the midst of a market dip, optimism reigned as keynote and AI Design Forum speakers addressed both looming challenges and explosive market opportunities during July 9-10 presentations at SEMICON West 2019 in San Francisco. SEMICON West again proved to be a magnet for visionaries who laid out the path to electronics innovation over the coming years.“The current business environment demands that the industry looks ahead toward issues that need attention sooner, not later – especially since we are approaching a once-in-a-generation inflection point that has the potential to be a $10 trillion opportunity,” observed SEMI Americas president Dave Anderson.Market forecasts punctuate the point: The microelectronics supply chain is on the verge of what has the potential to be the longest-lived electronics era.“Inflection points like this are rare, but not unprecedented,” Anderson added, citing 2007 as the inflection of the growth curve from new technologies that led to last year’s historic high semiconductor sales.SEMICON West squarely focused on the future, with a number of industry leaders noting that chip, tool and materials makers need to look beyond their immediate suppliers and customers in developing strategic partnerships. Dr. Cliff Young, data scientist with the Google Brain Team, for one, invited semiconductor and equipment firms to explore chip codesigning opportunities with his Google.The recently formed Quantum Economic Development Consortium – and its 50 members including Boeing, Google and IBM – debuted roadmapping activities devoted to the pursuit of U.S. leadership in the rapidly emerging global quantum computing industry. IBM’s Jeff Welser showcased the IBM Q Computer model built upon decades of semiconductor industry advances. Markets that could see staggering leaps from a quantum computational capacity include automotive, medical, financial and energy. Today, anyone can dabble with the future quantum computing capabilities by connecting online with IBM’s 16-qubit quantum computer. Dr. Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, suggested that software and other programming tends to develop more quickly if it is open sourced. He recommends an open source model that allows semiconductor and equipment companies to work together in the cloud to speed chip development.Nate Baxter, TEL development and production group general manager, advocated sharing big data with competitors in pre-competitive spaces to ensure data quality, improve measurement and solve problems faster. The key is security. “Yes, we can share data while protecting it,” he said. “We’re quickly seeing opportunities that we didn’t know existed.”Gary Dickerson, Applied Materials president and CEO, said that embedding artificial intelligence (AI) in chips will drive significant long-term industry growth by processing far more big data computations much faster than humans can.That is, if there is enough electricity. Almost invisibly, AI-enabled machines already are crunching massive amounts of data while gulping power in the process. As AI use rapidly expands, current power grids will be stressed as never before. Dickerson added that speed of innovation, societal acceptance, security and safety will guide how well and quickly AI is adopted. A potential hurdle, however, is sustainability. He warned power constraints could be “very high” and a “barrier to AI adoption if we don’t drive innovation” in substantially reducing the power draw of power-hungry AI chips.Of the five members of a venture capitalist panel, four agreed that Moore’s Law as we knew it is dead. The promising news is that the average age of a first-time mobile phone user is 10, more than 40 percent of the world population is now under 25 and about to wield considerable market influence, and 5G is on the cusp of helping connect trillions of devices. AMD CEO Lisa Su noted “there’s a tremendous amount of innovation yet to come” from microarchitectural advances, chiplets and die stacking, and heterogenous platforms.And there’s nothing more innovative – or intriguing – than regenerating human organs in mass volume. Legendary inventor Dean Kamen laid out his well-funded plans to biofabricate the viscera of human existence but warned of two crucial missing pieces – scale and talent. “I’m here at SEMICON West to beg for high-tech’s help in getting artificial human organs out of labs and ramped up for volume manufacturing and widespread distribution,” Kamen said during his keynote. “The basic science already exists, but researchers can’t bring it to scale like Silicon Valley can.”The talent Kamen needs to fulfill his dream will come from the pool of skilled workers the microelectronics industry is feverishly working to recruit to make good on its own ambitions. As if on cue, SEMI endorsed Kamen’s FIRST Global program, establishing a united effort to encourage young people worldwide to pursue engineering careers. “Together, we can better help provide a path to success for generations to come,” SEMI’s Anderson said.Scott Stevens, SEMI

Would you buy your next hotdog in parts, from un-coordinated suppliers? For example: Get the bun from a baker, the sausage from a butcher, mustard and/or ketchup and veggies from the nearest supermarket? If yes, you may find the sausage being too small, the veggies too big for the bun, and, when you finally finished adding mustard/ketchup and start eating, you may “enjoy” a cold sausage on a soggy bun!This “hotdog example” is just a very simple way to highlight the advantages of a well-coordinated semiconductor supply chain. What may be a few dollars and cents wasted in this hotdog purchase, can become millions of dollars lost to delays and inefficiencies during the roll-out of a new electronic system.Complexity is Increasing the ChallengeThe very innovative semiconductor industry is continuing to develop more complete and complex building blocks for electronic system solutions, with the intent of making our customers’ lives easier. However, every new technology takes increasingly more time for technical and business interfaces to mature before all the semiconductor supply chain members can serve customers in a smooth, efficient and cost-effective manner. In particular, coordination between design and manufacturing has always turned out to be in the critical path.SEMI, the manufacturers’ trade organization, and the Electronic System Design (ESD) Alliance, representing electronic design automation (EDA) tools vendors, developers of intellectual property (IP = ready-made building blocks for ICs) and IC design service providers, both recognized these challenges. Late in 2018, these two industry organizations decided to jointly address this painful, costly and often a very frustrating, yet critical path and became Strategic Association Partners, The goal is to establish a well-coordinated semiconductor supply chain.To make the value propositions of this partnership highly visible and demonstrate the first joint accomplishments, SEMI’s well-known SEMICON West conference and, in its first year, ES Design West, will be conveniently co-located in San Francisco’s Moscone Center from July 9 to 11, 2019. The synchronized schedules and geographic proximity of these events not only outlines the multi-faceted interdependence of manufacturing and design but encourages and enables conference attendees to do, what previously would have been viewed as “forming cross-border relationships.” It’s a new word now — please join the path to success and expand your network!Navigating SEMICON West and ES Design WestJust in case you are not yet planning to come to San Francisco early July, please check the Agendas-at-a-Glance for SEMICON West and ES Design West, to see how broad and valuable these parallel conferences are for your business. In addition, every customer, partner and semiconductor industry supplier can, from July 9 –11, walk from one conference section to the other, arrange face-to-face meetings, in dedicated meeting rooms, with representatives from both camps and discuss, from the first project planning step to the final production ramp-up, the many topics that need to be coordinated across parts or the entire supply chain to minimize delays and/or cost over-runs.Who Will Lead the Discussions?Conference attendees can, in addition to meeting many important supply chain partners face-to-face, hear about the latest technologies and market trends from key executives in our industry. Featured speakers are: David Pellerin, Head of Global Business Development, Amazon Web Services Lisa Su, President, and CEO, AMD Gary Dickerson, President, and CEO, Applied Materials Laurent Le Faucheur, Principal Engineer, Digital Signal Processing and Machine Learning, Arm, Ltd. Renee St. Amant, Ph.D., Research Engineer in Emerging Technologies and US Innovator of the Year, ARM Dean Kamen, President DEKA Research Development, Founder First and First Global Jeffrey Welser, Ph.D., Vice President and Lab Director, IBM Research-Almaden Dean Drako, President and CEO, IC Manage, Inc. Oreste Donzella, Sr. VP Chief Marketing Officer, KLA Corporation Prakash Narain, President, and CEO, Real Intent, Inc. Aart de Geus, Chairman, and Co-CEO, Synopsys, Inc. Manish Pandy, Fellow, Synopsys, Inc. Nate Baxter, General Manager, Development and Production Group, TEL US Like in previous years, SEMICON West and ES Design West offer a range of special features, addressing Smart Manufacturing, Smart Transportation, Smart MedTech and Smart Workforce development in dedicated pavilions as well as an AI Design Forum. Also, the many exhibitors from both camps will give conference attendees convenient opportunities to get to know new supply chain partners and/or refresh long-term business relationships. Search for the exhibitors you want to meet early July here. Questions to Ask for a Well-Coordinated Semiconductor Supply ChainIf I may, I would like to ask my many friends in the manufacturing camp to spend some time in the ES Design West section and ask the exhibitors a few questions, like: What can you do to get me to profit faster? To reduce development and unit cost? To improve yield, product quality, and reliability? When can you visit my team to discuss how your company can contribute to our goals?Vice versa, I would like to encourage my friends in the design camp to spend time in the SEMICON West section and ask exhibitors what their companies offer. When talking to manufacturers of IC, passive components or circuit boards, assembly and test houses, please ask very specific questions like: How can we help you reduce iterations between you and your customers? How can we help to improve IC test programs? How can we increase the throughput of your manufacturing equipment? How can we apply machine learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to minimize equipment downtime, improve yields and/or shorten production ramp-up?I can assure you that you’ll not only win great friends “across the border” but will be very impressed by the expertise you’ll find in the other camp and the willingness for and benefits of cross-border cooperation.I look forward to meeting you at SEMICON West and ES Design West. Also, if your schedule allows, mark your calendars for the June 12 MEPTEC Luncheon at SEMI in Milpitas, June 18 for the GSA’s Silicon Summit in Santa Clara and June 25 to 27 for the IMAPS SiP Conference in Monterey, CA. Hope to see you at one or all of these important events!Article originally published in 3D InCites. Herb Reiter is president of eda 2 asic Consulting.

OSATs (outsourced assembly and test companies) currently handle the bulk of assembly and test activity for the worldwide semiconductor industry. These companies’ factories have a manual operation legacy: Decision-making is manual. Materials and WIP (work in process) movement is manual. Practically everything in these factories is done manually. In addition, OSAT factory environments typically present many physical constraints with respect to equipment layout, material carriers and storage. All of these constraints present challenges when trying to automate material handling in these factories. OSATs also operate with far smaller gross and operating profit margins than IDMs, yet the percentage of worldwide semiconductor product handled by OSATs is currently increasing from year to year while the IDM share is decreasing. The combination of increased business volume with lower margins encourages OSATs to automate their factories, but there are challenges that must be overcome. Technical challenges abound OSATs face many technical challenges when trying to automate production. First, installed legacy equipment in these factories is typically 25 to 30 years old. This older equipment was simply not designed to accommodate automated materials handlers. For example, access doors on older equipment make automated WIP delivery and pickup nearly impossible without significant modifications to the equipment. Second, these factories are not equipped with the infrastructure needed to support automation. To start with, most of this older equipment is not SECS/GEM compliant. (SECS/GEM is the semiconductor industry's standard equipment interface protocol for equipment-to-host data communications.) This capability must either be retrofitted to the existing equipment or some other means of extracting required data from the equipment – getting it from the PLCs controlling the equipment, for example – must be employed. Similarly, the WIP carriers currently in use – wafer carriers, trays, magazines, and the like – are not designed for automation. In contrast to the semiconductor wafer fab industry, it seems that almost every company in the OSAT domain has a different idea concerning what a carrier should look like. In particular, there’s no such thing as the standard 300mm FOUP (Front Opening Unified Pod), which carries wafers from one tool to the next inside of semiconductor fabs. The variations in carrier shapes, configurations, and even gripping handles in the OSAT domain thwarts progress in OSAT factory automation. How do you design a materials-handling robot with the grippers and flexibility needed to adapt to all of these different carriers? It’s a difficult question and an expensive proposition. OSAT facilities themselves are designed for human-based materials handling, not automated materials handling, simply because they were designed at a time when automation was not contemplated. As a result, the equipment in these facilities is packed very closely together (to reduce floor space costs), as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Equipment in a test facility is often tightly packed, which impedes the adoption of automated materials handling. It’s very difficult to add automated materials handling equipment at floor level or even at ceiling level in these OSAT factories, as is frequently done inside of a semiconductor wafer fab. You will not see AGVs (automated guided vehicles) moving around inside of legacy OSAT factories because there’s simply no room for them to move around. Tackling the challenges So, what can be done to handle these all of challenges? You must start by understanding the nature of the operations taking place inside of the factory. As stated above, most of these operations are currently performed manually. All of the decisions and the materials transport is performed by humans. There’s simply no way to transition from a fully manual operation to a fully automated operation in one jump. It’s too far a reach. A significant amount of work is needed just to reach the level where automated decision making is possible. Key systems must be added to enable this level of automation. Many companies tried and failed to automate assembly and test in OSAT facilities about 25 years ago. They failed because the required data could not be extracted from the equipment in use and, therefore, there was no data to drive good decision-making. Too many required systems were simply lacking. For example, when AGVs were added, one or two operators had to walk along with the AGV to tell it what to do. There was no benefit from the automation in this example. There was no successful path to automation at the time. Standards needed One of the major obstacles to automating assembly and test in OSAT facilities is a lack of standards for carriers, robotics, layout, and facilities. Many front-end standards exist. The SEMI-E82, SEMI-E84, and SEMI-E88 standards designed for semiconductor fab front ends might apply, but they need to be adapted to requirements for OSAT back-end facilities. In addition, OSATs have special needs that may demand new standards. This is a real opportunity for SEMI and its constituents. An architecture for full assembly and test automation involves four layers, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Full automation for assembly and test involves four layers. Starting with the data layer at the top of Figure 2, a fully automated facility needs to have database systems in place that can supply all of the data needed for making smart scheduling and dispatch decisions. These databases then feed smart, automated scheduling and dispatch applications in the logic layer. The scheduling and dispatch applications then send control commands to the automated transport and materials controllers and the automated equipment handlers in the control layer. You need to start at the top of the diagram to put all of this automation in place. The automated equipment and equipment controllers need commands from the scheduling and dispatch applications, which in turn need data from the databases to make smart decisions. So it’s the data layer and the systems that feed data to this layer that constitute the starting point for the journey to full automation. A significant amount of simulation is needed to develop optimal facility workflows. These simulations are driven by data extracted from the databases. One of the frequently ignored facets of automation is the need for backup plans. For example, what is the backup plan when an AGV fails and cannot deliver material as scheduled? Simulation helps create contingency plans for such events. A case study Applied Materials has worked with assembly and test factories in deploying full automation. Towards this objective, the factories have worked on many modifications (physical and systems) to enable this automation. For example, a die-attach machine was retrofitted for automation by removing all of its equipment doors so that an AGV could load the machine and extract completed work. Additional modifications permitted the mounting of multiple magazines on the die-attach machine’s input and output to provide the buffering needed to smooth the flow of work through the machine. Finally, simple instrumentation and networking was added to the machine to aid in making WIP delivery and pickup decisions. These machine modifications addressed only the bottlenecks in this particular machine, but even these simple modifications helped to reduce the incidence of manual handling errors, such as the misalignment of magazines or trays. Modifications like these also reduce the need for human operators, which in turn reduces operating costs. Such types of incremental enhancements in automation capability have been implemented by leading-edge companies over the past few years. Conclusion Deploying full automation for assembly and test is not only feasible, it’s necessary for future profitability. OSATs must address the challenges of rising manufacturing volumes and thin margins by reducing manufacturing errors and increasing quality. (The quality requirement is increasingly driven by the automotive industry.) Trailblazing deployments have shown that it’s possible to automate these manufacturing lines successfully. While IDMs have a longer history for manufacturing automation, OSATs are now traveling along the same path due to their rising share of worldwide manufacturing volumes. On that path, they’ll need to develop experience and new standards tailored to their unique needs. Shekar Krishnaswamy is a senior manager at Applied Materials responsible for business development and pre-sales of factory automation products and solutions. He has over 27 years of experience in all aspects of semiconductor manufacturing including wafer fab manufacturing, bump, assembly and test. His specific areas of expertise are traditional industrial engineering methods as well as systems-related methodologies such as modeling, scheduling, dispatching and factory automation. Prior to Applied Materials, Shekar held senior technical and management positions at IBM, Motorola and AMD, including management of corporate operations research departments supporting factory and service groups. Shekar has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial engineering and operations research. Note: SEMI has a Smart Manufacturing Technology Community. For more information or to get involved, click here.

Spotlight on SEMI Women is excited to recognize Q4 2018 honoree Ellie Yieh from Applied Materials!Spotlight on SEMI Women recognizes and celebrates accomplished women working in the global microelectronics industry. Nominees include women who are beacons of knowledge, leaders of organizations and initiatives, hidden heroes and innovators in our industry. They are volunteers, protectors, intellectual disruptors and activists. SEMI’s Diversity Inclusion Board works with our member companies to shine a spotlight on these amazing women. Learn how you can nominate a woman for Spotlight on SEMI Women.Ellie Yieh has been a trailblazer at Applied Materials since she began her career with Applied in 1989 as a process engineer in the Chemical Vapor Deposition group. Ellie’s contributions have made a lasting impact on the business and she continues her path of innovation as corporate vice president for Advanced Product Technology Development. Ellie is responsible for the company’s state-of-the-art Maydan Technology Center and works closely with customers and business units to drive advanced product development and technology roadmaps. In addition, Ellie leads R D for developing new memory and logic innovations that will drive future business opportunities for Applied. In 2018 she was named an Applied Materials Fellow, the company’s highest honor for outstanding technical achievement. She is also a board member of Applied Ventures, LLC, the company’s venture capital arm.During her 30 years at Applied, she has led the development of several successful products and enabled her teams to deliver growth in profitability and market share, while building strong customer relationships and developing innovative technologies. Of note is Ellie’s leadership in developing industry-leading Gapfill technologies to address the increasingly important shallow trench isolation and inter-layer dielectric applications for denser pitches. Further, Ellie spearheaded the adoption of Applied’s low-k Producer® Black Diamond® system, helping to develop and introduce a robust, low-k film that could withstand both the newly adopted copper back end-of-line and packaging integration challenges.st honor for outstanding technical achievement. She is also a board member of Applied Ventures, LLC, the company’s venture capital arm.Ellie’s journey in technology began when she immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan at the age of 15 with her family. She quickly stood out due to her stellar academic performance in math and science. Her academic excellence landed her at UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry. Ellie’s adaptability as an Asian female became crucial as she navigated a field dominated by male engineers. She received a B.S. in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley and now holds more than 100 semiconductor engineering patents. In 2016 she was inducted into the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame for outstanding contributions to the scientific and technological communities. She was also named one of the 2015 “Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology” by the National Diversity Council.Ellie has also been spending time championing for woman engineers. She is a member of the advisory boards for UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry and the Silicon Valley Women in Engineering group at San Jose State University.Ellie finds working in the semiconductor industry rewarding because “the technical challenges come like clockwork so we are always on our toes working on the next problem and the next solution. I enjoy each of the challenges to put the puzzle together. It’s a team sport; we are all dependent on each other to win and when we look at a problem I am just another engineer on the team trying to solve the problem. But I am also responsible for setting higher level direction for priorities, objectives and vision. It has been very fun for me and I love what I do.”Cristina Sandoval is manager of Workforce Development at SEMI.