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Hungry men in expensive suits
haunt Semicon By Joshua Seed: Wednesday 16 July 2003, 10:50 THIS IS AN article in two parts, the first concerning the wafer processing portion of SEMICON west, held annually at the Moscone center in San Francisco. The second article will concern the final manufacturing part of SEMICON, held in San Jose. SEMICON West 2003 provides a microcosmic example of the state of the chip industry. It attracts an odd crew of hungry looking men in expensive suits. Tantalus, of Greek mythology, lived in a pool of water which would shrink away when he tried to drink, while above him on a vine hung grapes, just out of reach. The show attendees could smell money, had the zeal for it in their eyes, but like Tantalus's grapes, it's just out of reach. SEMICON is a fab equipment vendor trade show. The real men with fabs, the men with a cool 3 billion to drop on a 300mm fab, are these vendors' customers. If you have three billion dollars to spend, the vendors come to you. You do not have to go to the show. So they didn't. The large fab houses were conspicuously absent. No Intel, Infineon, UMC, TSMC, Samsung, Powerchip, ProMOS or TI. Conspicuously present, IBM had a tiny booth. They looked like Microsoft at LinuxWorld Expo. So, what was IBM peddling? It was lobbying Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International to accept open standards on fabrication machines. This would lower the cost of building fabs, and allow fab operators to avoid vendor lock in, currently accomplished by the big equipment vendors by using proprietary standards. This is likely to be well received by the smaller equipment vendors because it simplifies their design process, and allows them to gain access to markets that they are currently locked out of. IBM had a small army out lobbying these small vendors directly. Fab owners can see how this would lower their fab construction costs as well, and may be rallying around IBM in this pursuit. We've seen IBM use similar tactics in other markets. IBM has allied with AMD on the .09µ node, against Intel. Intel is forced to lower prices due to competitive pressure, and IBM reaps the rewards. IBM supports Linux against Microsoft. This forces Microsoft to remain price competitive, and prevents them from gaining a hammerlock on the server OS industry. IBM supports Apple against both Intel and Microsoft. All of these measures reduce IBM's costs, because IBM still must buy chips from Intel and OEM licenses from Microsoft. The "Sufficiently Advanced Technology that is Indistinguishable from Magic" award for the show, after seeing the fab toys from 1500 vendors, goes to the Precision Technology Group, PTG for their planar servomotor. It is a cast iron table, upon which a small "forcer" flits and glides. The forcer is used for work positioning to repeatable 1 micron accuracy, and it works by magic. The "Overclocker's dream tool" award goes to Neocera for their "Magma C20", which is a magnetic microscope. It "sees" the magnetic field of current leak through the chip package. Quite useful to those that need to know exactly how much voltage a Pentium 4 2.4C will take before hitting the point of no return. A gong goes to Ned Barnholt, chairman, president and CEO of Agilent Technologies, for declaring during his keynote, "a focus on innovation and R&D would help the industry prepare itself for the next set of challenges and opportunities. We have a unique opportunity to reinvent ourselves through innovation." Every vendor promptly placed the word "Innovative" in a conspicuous spot, in many cases an obvious last minute job. Gong runner up goes to the numerous vendors with no engineers present. There is comedy watching one suit describe a machine to another suit, despite the fact that neither suit has any idea what the machine is or does. Some of these guys would not know the difference between a 300mm wafer and a pizza pie. Unfortunately, SEMICON is not a booth babe style trade show, But I could have watched Thermocoax's engineer talk for hours. There is nothing she did not know about thermocouples. This was my turn to play Tantalus. µ
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