March 2006

April, 2006

Welcome to Thin Film Manufacturing News! I continue to struggle to attend to the tasks at hand and to keep in touch with the many people I meet at shows and conferences. This newsletter remains part of my answer. My New Year's Resolution for 2006 is to publish it more frequently!

It's a brief, monthly look at some of the issues facing the industry, combined with links to helpful resources and now and then a bit of personal news.

If you are a subscriber, feel free to forward this newsletter in its entirety to friends who might find it interesting. If you are not a subscriber, you can become one by visiting the newsletter's home page, at https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/newsletter/index.htm
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Katherine’s Commentary
2. Best of the Blog
3. In Press
4. An Inside Peek
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe
6. Forwarding and Feedback

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1. Katherine's Commentary

Where to begin? The last few months have been pretty hectic here, with deadline crunches piling on deadline crunches on top of conferences. IEEE's Electron Device Meeting was, as usual, one of the best conferences of 2005. I've spent the last three months writing articles for Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine about strain engineering, gate stacks, and advanced memories, all drawing on material covered at IEDM.

The magazine is the place to look for all the details. The short version, though, is that the industry should be very glad that strain appears to offer substantial mobility improvements for several generations to come, because neither metal gates nor high-k gate dielectrics are going to be in manufacturing any time soon. Without those advances, scaling becomes very difficult.

One of the side effects of poor gate scaling, increasing leakage current, is a serious problem for low power devices. Unfortunately, low power devices are also the fastest growing segment of the market. Hence my current project, an article on power management for the May issue of Semiconductor Manufacturing....

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2. Best of the Blog

Katherine's Blog (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/index.shtml) is an almost daily selection of interesting links from around the web. Here are some of the highlights of the last few months.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2006_03_05.html#001185
Forbes, quoting an interview in the Financial Times, reports that ASML is considering expanding into other areas of semiconductor manufacturing, perhaps by "buying a cluster of technology companies." Sounds like a good idea on paper, but I'm remembering how much trouble they had digesting the non-lithography parts of SVG. Heck, I'm remembering how much trouble they had digesting the lithography portion of SVG.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2006_02_26.html#001183
I just finished a long overdue update of my book-to-bill chart, and I noticed something very interesting. Before 2002, there are huge differences between bookings and shipments. Bookings go up, and come down, well in advance of shipments. After 2002, that gap pretty much goes away, with the numbers moving pretty much in lockstep.

This is pretty clear evidence of a change that people have been talking about for a while. Fabs have gotten much smarter about their equipment ordering, turning the flow of orders on and off much more quickly. At the same time, equipment suppliers have gotten much more responsive, shrinking lead times so that fabs don't have to anticipate their needs nearly as far in advance.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2006_02_05.html
For my writer friends, a Washington Post column about teaching writing to Inuit women in northern Canada.

[Writing] is for the eagle. It's for giving the eagle wings. It's also for us, who watch it fly.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2006_01_29.html
One of the things I've been working on instead of updating the newsletter is a study of the photovoltaic market. I can't post the results for a while due to my client's exclusivity clause, but a lot of the key statistics are readily available. Currently the average world price for solar electricity is between 21 and 38 cents per kilowatt hour. (Residential installations are more, industrial installations are less.) My local utility, NStar, is between 13 and 18 cents per kilowatt hour. Lots of variables go into calculating the payback time -- cost of the installation, cost of money, tax incentives, amount of sunshine -- but 15 to 20 years is a good back of the envelope estimate.

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3. What’s In Press:
Here's what I'm working on and where (and when) it will appear. If you would like to send information relevant to any of these topics, please contact me at least two months before the scheduled publication date.

My next big project is a book, working title Semiconductor Manufacturing in Nontechnical Language. It's just what it sounds like, a reference for nontechnical people who work in or follow the industry. PennWell Books will be publishing it, though not until at least 2007 given that I have to write it first... Those familiar with the industry know PennWell as the publisher of Solid State Technology magazine. Updates as the project proceeds.

In the near term, upcoming articles for Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine include a two part series on Advanced Lithography, in June and August, and a two-part series on Yield Management and Process Control, in July and September.

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4. An Inside Peek

Those of you who've met me in person have probably seen, or at least heard me talk about, my Mazda Miata convertible. But all good things must end, and the Miata was sold to a friend of ours last October. Its successor, a British racing green MINI convertible, is eagerly awaiting the first warm days of spring.

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5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe

To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit the newsletter home page at https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/newsletter/index.htm
This is an opt-in newsletter. We respect the privacy of all readers. We will use your address only to deliver your newsletter subscription. We do not rent, sell, or loan our list, and we use industry standard security procedures to prevent unauthorized use. For human assistance with your subscription, send email to owner-thinfilmmfg-news@thinfilmmfg.com.

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6. Forwarding and Feedback
Ours is an information service. If you are experiencing problems, challenges and issues with which you think our research can assist, we need to know. We want to know what you'd like to know about. If you've seen some valuable information here that a friend needs, they need to know. Please feel free to copy or distribute this newsletter in its entirety to all interested parties.
Katherine Derbyshire
kderbyshire@thinfilmmfg.com
https://www.thinfilmmfg.com
This newsletter is Copyright 2006 by Thin Film Manufacturing. All Rights Reserved