San Francisco. SEMICON West is like Major League Baseball's All Star Game, said Ajit Manocha, CEO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, in his keynote address at SEMICON West this week. Semiconductor equipment and materials players bring their best game, and attendees can choose the best of the best.
And the best of the best is what will be required as semiconductor manufacturers deal with the challenges of the burgeoning mobility field. Manocha recalled old advertisements advising viewers not to leave home without American Express. Today, such an ad might advise not leaving home without a smartphone.
To that end, Manocha instructed attendees to take out their phones and send a text code indicating whether they see technology, talent, or economics as presenting the greatest challenge to the semiconductor industry. Economics came out on top by a wide margin. Manocha went on to describe mobility's impact on semiconductor consumption. The market for cellphone ICs crossed that for PC chips in 2012, and, with tablets included, the mobility IC market will double that for PC ICs in 2016.
Manufacturers must contend with stringent requirements for power, performance, and area. In addition, foundries want to preserve their investment in, for example, 0.18-µm and 90-nm production—they want to continue to monetize their old fabs. Functions like power management can help companies make use of existing assets, yet pressure exists to upgrade every year.
Manocha cited the big 5 technological challenges. The first four are
- architectures and materials,
- lithography and EUV,
- packaging, and
- 450-mm wafers.
The fifth, he said, is
- cost.
Cost, he said, has often been implicit within other challenges, but he wanted to make a point of citing it explicitly. And at advanced nodes, he said, lithography starts to dominate wafer cost. He also focused on packaging, describing logic and memory on interposers, memory cubes, and heterogeneous stacking. Economic realities, he said, are combining with technical complexity to make equipment represent a greater proportion of overall fab cost.
He described fab strategies that emerged in the 1990s as “Foundry 1.0″—it was based on an adversarial transaction focus with a zero-sum orientation. Moving forward, he said, we well need “Foundry 2.0,” which involves partnering for success—a collaborative approach that looks not just to cost and time to market or time to volume but rather “time to everything.” Foundry 1.0 will no longer work, he said—the best solutions will not arise from insulated teams. Instead, with Foundry 2.0, we must tap global R&D talent. “It takes an ecosystem,” he said, extending from EDA through assembly and test. “The rules of the game have changed,” he said, adding that teams must be “engaging early, deeply, openly, and comprehensively” to help close the gap from lab to fab.
“Foundry 2.0 is fully optimized for the mobile era,” he concluded. “Challenge your teams to play in the big leagues of Foundry 2.0.”
SEMI Outstanding EHS Achievement Award
At the conclusion of the keynote address, SEMI presented Manocha with the “SEMI Outstanding EHS [Environment, Health, and Safety] Achievement Award—Inspired by Akira Inoue.”
Manocha heads GLOBALFOUNDRIES Executive Stewards Council (ESC), the leadership forum for strategic direction and accountability for risk management, corporate responsibility, and sustainability. The awards committee cited Manocha’s leadership as instrumental in significant EHS achievements at GLOBALFOUNDRIES:
- Zero-incident safety culture—GLOBALFOUNDRIES safety goal is to continually reduce all injuries and Manocha continually challenged the EHS and project management teams to achieve zero incidents. For example, Manocha ensured that there was a strong focus on safety metrics in the executive project reviews of the new Fab 8 in Malta, NY. GLOBALFOUNDRIES' Singapore fabs all received “Silver Awards” for health and safety presented by the Workplace Safety and Health Council and supported by the Singapore Ministry of Manpower.
- Commitment to eco-efficiency in foundry operations—In 2012, GLOBALFOUNDRIES set corporate environmental goals to reduce GHG emissions 40% by 2015, electricity consumption 35% by 2015, and water consumption 10% by 2015, all normalized to a manufacturing index and compared to 2010. Fab 8 incorporates multiple energy efficiency measures, waste heat recovery, and “idle mode” for abatement systems and vacuum pumps. Fab 1 in Dresden is powered by two energy-efficient tri-generation power plants that provide electricity, heating, and cooling to fab operations. GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ Singapore operation utilizes reclaimed NEWater for incoming supply and achieved an energy reduction of 50 GWh in 2012, with a 2013 goal of a further 57-GWh reduction.
- WSC Commitment to Best Practices for Perfluoro-Compound (PFC) Reduction—At the 2012 annual CEO meeting of the World Semiconductor Council (WSC), Manocha led the discussion of EHS topics, urging his fellow CEOs to take action to protect the environment, conserve resources, and achieve the WSC’s PFC reduction goal. GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ newest U.S. fab, Fab 8, meets the WSC Best Practice commitment for PFC emission reduction, and Fab 1 has incorporated best practices for PFC reduction since 1999.
- WSC Commitment to a “Conflict-Free Supply Chain”—At the 2013 WSC meeting, Manocha championed a “Conflict-free Supply Chain” policy to address concerns related to sourcing tantalum, tungsten, tin, and gold from conflict regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and adjoining countries. The WSC subsequently adopted such a policy. For its part, GLOBALFOUNDRIES has already met customer requests for “Tantalum Conflict-free” products in 2012.
The “Outstanding EHS Achievement Award—Inspired by Akira Inoue” is sponsored by the EHS Division of SEMI. The award is named after the late Akira Inoue, past president of Tokyo Electron Limited and a strong advocate of EHS. Inoue also served on the SEMI board of directors. The award recognizes individuals in industry and academia who have made significant contributions by exercising leadership or demonstrating innovation in the development of processes, products or materials that reduce EHS impacts during semiconductor manufacturing.
Past recipients of the SEMI EHS Akira Inoue Award include Richard Templeton (president and CEO, Texas Instruments), Atsutoshi Nishida (president and CEO, Toshiba), Dr. Jong-Kap Kim (chairman and CEO, Hynix Semiconductor), and Dr. Morris Chang (chairman and CEO, TSMC).
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