Aug

29

One big friend gathering at AMAT Singapore Tech Forum

Filed Under Equipment, Foundry, Movers and Shakers, Video Gallery | Leave a Comment

I attended the Applied Material Technology Forum (AMTF) yesterday at the Marina Mandarin Hotel, Singapore, together with my 7 colleagues from AMD. To my pleasant surprise, I was delighted to meet up with many old friends from all over Singapore in this event. There are many friends from my previous company STMicroelectronics. They told me that life is still pretty much the same after the change in company name to Numonyx. l also saw many good old Fab 2 Thin Film gangs. Some of them still works in Chartered, while others have moved to other companies, like SSMC, UMC, Siltronic and IME. Amazingly, all of them still looks pretty much the same. There is no sign of aging even after more than 10 years!! I also met up with a few old friends from AMAT. I guess I am the one who know the most participants in this event. During the luncheon, there was a table half filled with Chartered folks, and the other half occupied by STMicro folks. I bet I am the only one that know all of them in that table. haha.

In my opinion, this conference is very interesting and informative. Chartered CEO, Chia Song Hwee, kicked start the event with an insightful prescription for collaborative alliance. He drove home the points that the escalating R&D cost and slowing revenue growth have effectively forced companies, even competitors, to seek collaboration to improve cost efficiency, mitigate risk and shorten time-to-market. However, he stressed that the basis of this collaborative alliance is win-win, and individual company must still leverage on their core competences to win business. After that, Sanjay from AMAT gave a detailed internal analysis of the industry, the evolution of industry towards fabless-foundry model, the fabs demand and supply. By and large, he painted a rather optimistic outlook of the industry. After the morning break, Peter Cheang from ASML gave a very good overview of the lithography challenges beyond 45nm. He analyzed the challenges in terms of three fundamental parameters in the famous Rayleigh’s equation: k1, NA and lamda. Now, I understand why double patterning (DP) technology is needed for breaking the k1 limit of 0.25 since it is really difficult to find high-index fluid to increase NA. He then advocated the necessity of EUV lithography to go beyond 32nm for friendly k1. I was really impressed by his talk. I also understand now how AMAT comes into the picture of lithography segment. AMAT is apparently collaborating with ASML to develop carbon-based dielectrics for various hard mask and DP schemes. After the luncheon, there are two parallel sessions. One focused on FEOL high-k/metal-gate/laser-anneal, while the other focused on litho and metrology. I attended the later since I always want to learn something that I don’t know. :D

I’ve received the presentation slides for the Applied Material Singapore Tech Forum. I have uploaded three of the keynote presentation slides here. One on high-k metal-gate, one on industry outlook and the last one on ASML lithography roadmap. You could also view all the Applied Material presentation on my slideshare site.

All in all, this is a very successful event. I saw this nice video from AMAT website. I like their new tagline: “Think it, Apply it”. To me, knowledge is useless if you don’t apply it.


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Dec

24

Chartered doing well in Q4 2006

Filed Under Foundry, Movers and Shakers, Semiconductor Industry | 1 Comment

During a recent interview of Chartered Semiconductor Mfg CEO Chia Song Hwee by Digitimes, Chia noted that the required breakeven utilization rate at a 12-inch fab is about 60-65% while it is 70% at an 8-inch fab. Although having seen challenging price competition on advanced nodes production than a year ago, Chia also noted that the proportion of Chartered’s 90nm production will grow slightly above 30% in the fourth quarter of 2006.
On the other hand, George Thomas, senior vice president & CFO of Chartered, reiterated Chartered Q4 revenue guidance in the press release:
The quarter is essentially progressing in line with what we had anticipated earlier. Utilization across our individual fabs is tracking our earlier expectation, and we expect the overall utilization to be approximately 70 percent for the fourth quarter, in line with our previous guidance. We are also reiterating the revenue and net income guidance we originally provided in October.

From the above quotes by Chia and George, Chartered Semiconductor overall fab utilization is above the break-even point and the company should be doing well in Q4 2006.

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