By David Lammers

Now that modern-day fabs rely much less on operators, there is a tendency to downplay labor as an important factor in chip manufacturing. While it is true that 300-mm fabs require many fewer operators, the need for technicians who can install and maintain the incredibly expensive equipment is becoming more important.

Here in Austin, experienced equipment technicians and fab managers are being recruited to move to New York to work for the GlobalFoundries fab near Saratoga Springs. The GlobalFoundries pull is requiring Samsung Austin, Spansion, and Freescale to try and figure out how to hang on to their best people. And as Applied Materials tries to meet strong demand for refurbished equipment from its Austin facility, that means tracking down knowledgeable equipment people who may have moved on to jobs elsewhere.

Recruiting engineers and technicians to semiconductor manufacturing isn’t easy. Chemical engineers at the University of Texas at Austin, for example, look first to the energy (oil and gas) companies, where salaries are higher, though that often requires living in Houston.

Now that the Japan quake has caused such havoc, analysts such as Dale Ford at IHS iSuppli and Bill McClean at IC Insights have been saying the electronics industry needs to seriously rethink its dependence on suppliers in earthquake-prone areas. McClean issued a bulletin called “IC Fabs in Danger” which noted that “fully 90% of pure-play IC foundry capacity is located in seismically active regions.”

“Since the two largest IC foundries in the world (TSMC and UMC) have such a significant presence in Taiwan,” McClean said, “a disastrous earthquake or typhoon in that country would have serious ramifications for the entire electronics supply chain.” Dale Ford at iSuppli said exactly the same thing on two Webcasts about the Japan quake’s impact on the supply chain.

Foundries, notably TSMC, have convinced many of their customers to strike up sole-source relationships in return for attractive wafer pricing. Because so many part types are sole-sourced, McClean argues that “the ramifications of damage to IC foundry fabrication facilities would be much greater than damage done to individual IDM IC fabs.”

Security goes beyond earthquakes and typhoons. Samsung has 330 acres in Austin, and the company fully expects to populate that space with five chip fabs. Not only is central Texas considered to be an earthquake-free zone, it is far away from North Korea. Apple sat down with Samsung at one point and said it would not accept having so much of its chip supply coming from fabs just a few dozen miles from North Korea’s artillery. Being able to tap UT-Austin’s engineering talent was another major factor in the Austin expansion.

Morris Chang, the CEO of TSMC, has decided to build TSMC’s third megafab in Taichung, in central Taiwan. With megafabs in Hsinchu in the north and Tainan in the south, one wonders if Chang considered building TSMC’s third megafab in an earthquake-free zone?

That leads back to labor availability. Don Brooks, who held executive positions at TSMC from 1991-1997, once explained that TSMC surely gained tax advantages by being in Taiwan, compared with being in the United States. “The real advantage TSMC has is the Taiwan engineers. They work incredibly hard,” he told me in the mid-1990s.

And for not a whole lot of money, either. While long-time TSMC employees have been enriched by stock options, the labor costs in Taichung are surely less than they would be in, say, Dallas, where Chang worked until moving to Taiwan in the mid-1980s.

Chang once told me that TSMC had a hard time attracting engineers to work at its Camas, Wash. fab. He said TSMC was at a disadvantage in trying to hire American engineers, who, if they were good at their profession, often had more attractive offers from Intel and others. That is probably still true.

The increased awareness of earthquake dangers butts up against the traditional manufacturing questions of who has good yields, who has capacity, who has the best wafer costs. No doubt about it. For a company to put all of its chip supply in earthquake-prone areas is nothing short of stupid. As long as the earth’s core remains molten, volcanoes and earthquakes occur, naturally and often. No wishful thinking can alter the tendency for them to happen most often in China, Taiwan, Japan,  (where I lived for 19 years) and the U.S. West coast. Surprisingly, South Korea is not considered to be in a seismic zone.

But capacity is king, and right now, TSMC has more of it than any other foundry. And it is building enough new capacity to serve its customers, even as they bite their fingernails in fear of a major Taiwan quake like the one that hit Japan’s Tohoku region.

Until GlobalFoundries can build a couple more fabs in Dresden and Malta (with Abu Dhabi coming next), and, more importantly, attract and train the young engineers and technicians who know how to make those new fabs hum at high yields, the earthquake warnings will remain a long-term concern in an industry notorious for short-term thinking.

Source: Wikipedia

By David Lammers

Can Alchimer cross the “valley of death” – the gap between an innovative idea and commercial acceptance?

Europeans raise the issue often, saying that too many technologies hatched in European research labs fail to make a dent in the marketplace. Alchimer’s technology appears to be at least halfway across that gap, four years after its “electrografting” barrier and seed deposition first gained widespread attention.

Alchimer, based in Massy, France, offers a wet chemistry approach to seed and barrier deposition that works with electroplating tools rather than the more expensive CVD and ALD deposition equipment required for today’s barrier and seed layers.

I first heard about Alchimer when I joined Semiconductor International magazine in mid-2007. Then editor-in-chief Peter Singer wrote a detailed article about Alchimer, complete with some great graphics, and the story got a number of page views. When the offer came to meet Alchimer’s CEO Steve Lerner while I was in France for the SEMI ISS Europe meeting, I jumped at the opportunity.

Lerner is a battle-hardened American packaging industry executive who was named CEO of the French spinout before the 2008 downturn. (He spent an earlier stint in Europe managing Amkor’s European business.) He managed to raise enough money – right in the middle of the downturn — to stave off a potential bankruptcy.

Now, Lerner claims Alchimer is on the verge of breaking through to commercial adoption. The company has been demonstrating its technology at a lab in Seoul, and another in Taiwan, for the past year. “We have been in a proof of concept relationship with an industrial partner in Korea, one of the biggest companies in the world. They will start out using the Alchimer technology in two product areas that are not on anyone’s roadmap,” Lerner said.

Once Alchimer and its unnamed partners show that the approach works and is cost effective, Lerner said several other customers will adopt the Alchimer technology. “We are in the mode of breaking through with one or two of the big guys,” Lerner said.

“Three years ago we could only demonstrate one film. Now, we have two 300-mm proof of concept lines, and we are knocking off the technical issues one by one,” Lerner said.

The Alchimer technology has applications beyond through silicon vias (TSVs). The conductive layer in solar cells is another major opportunity. “We can deposit a thin-film nickel barrier layer,” Lerner said, that will improve the conversion efficiency of solar cells.

In wafer-level packaging, Lerner said the Alchimer approach “can replace PVD and sputtering for all conductive films.”

The French company has been developing a deeper file of third-party reliability data to show customers. It has redesigned its Web site. And Lerner, while keeping his home base in Paris, is spending most of his work days in Asia where the highest volume customers are.

Steve Lerner

He talks knowledgeably about how hard it is for any startup to go head-to-head with the largest equipment companies. There are plenty of startups, and plenty of smart CEOs such as Lerner, who have talked a good game but ultimately failed.

With 3D TSVs, solar, LEDs, interposers, and wafer level packaging all in various states of technological change, there are myriad opportunities for advances in deposition.

Lerner is convinced that Alchimer has what it takes – both in terms of technology and cost savings — to cross “the valley of death.”  It is a story worth following.

By David Lammers

The job market is strong now for engineers with semiconductor manufacturing skills.

In Dresden, Germany, GlobalFoundries is hiring many of the former Qimonda manufacturing engineers. “I don’t want to say that we are happy about Qimonda’s bankruptcy,” a GlobalFoundries manager said. “But last month we hired about 150 people in Dresden, and roughly half of them were available to us because of what happened at Qimonda,” he said, adding that experienced talent is becoming more difficult to find in Europe.

GlobalFoundries is generating another wave of hiring in the Saratoga Springs area: Novellus Systems, for example, has a number of jobs openings there to support equipment being installed at the GlobalFoundries Malta fab.

Abu Dhabi also is looking for talent as it prepares to launch its semiconductor manufacturing initiative.

In Austin, Samsung Semiconductor Austin is hiring an additional 300 engineers and technicians talent for its $3.6 billion logic expansion, where SoCs for Apple and other customers will be fabricated. And Samsung is staffing a logic design center in Austin as well. Samsung has more than 400 job openings on its U.S. Web site.

Texas is actively recruiting California companies to move to Texas, touting the lack of an income tax in the Lone Star state. The Texas strategy, explained veteran Texas journalist Neal Spelce, is to avoid an income tax at nearly all costs, thereby luring CEOs from California and other higher-tax states. By convincing C-level executives that their taxes will be much lower in Texas, the belief is that some of these managers will move their companies to Texas. In turn, jobs will be more available here, stimulating spending and home buying (Texas relies on sales and property taxes for most of its revenues). Eventually money will trickle down to the school districts, boosting the per-pupil spending.

(UPDATE: The Austin American-Statesman reported (April 6) on a visiting delegation of California officials and businessmen, seeking to learn why some California companies have located operations in Texas rather than in California. The report quotes the Texas Workforce Commission, which said Texas’ unemployment rate was 8.2 percent in February. The California Employment Development Department said the Golden State’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 12.2 percent in February.)

Gov. Rick Perry has been touting his low-taxes-equals-job-creation strategy to Californians with increasing frequency. Perry said he met with James Plummer, dean of the Stanford School of Engineering, who advised Perry to promote a culture of entrepreneurship at the University of Texas at Austin.

Plummer subsequently told the Austin American-Statesman “we certainly were not making any prediction of whether Austin could be or should be the next Silicon Valley. It certainly has many of the elements to be the kind of place Silicon Valley is.”

From another vantage point Texas is a state in fiscal and social crisis. It consistently has one of the lowest rankings in the United States in educational levels (45^th of 50, by one list). Rather than boosting educational spending, tens of thousands of Texas teachers are likely to lose their jobs this year because of a shortfall in tax revenues.

In Austin, for example, the economy is in fairly good shape. The housing market never collapsed, and people continued to move to Austin throughout the downturn, attracted by new companies starting up or moving here. With stores and restaurants relatively crowded again, one might assume that education would also be well supported. Instead, the Austin Independent School District is in the process of laying off about 1,000 employees, the majority of them teachers, because of a shortfall in state funding due to the over-reliance on property and sales taxes.

Texas is a great place to be a highly paid CEO, or even a well-paid engineer. For teachers, at least this year, not so much.