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Sharp contrasts in growth rates reflect a persistent cycle in the semiconductor business even with no ups and downs of the economy. The cycle comprises significant capacity addition, declining average selling prices, weak market, reduced capital spending, little capacity addition, increasing average selling prices, strong market, and strong capital spending. While the duration of the cycles and their amplitude may or may not be shrinking, the up-and-down market has enormous impact on chipmakers and suppliers of semiconductor equipment and electronic chemicals in terms of capital spending and strategic planning.
The electronic industry uses a broad range of highly sophisticated specialty chemicals in many processing steps in the manufacture of electronic components and products, in silicon wafers and integrated circuits (IC), for packaging and printed circuit boards (PCBs), in the manufacture of compound semiconductors and optoelectronics, and in the production of flat panel display products. This report covers the major specialty chemicals consumed in the production of integrated circuits or silicon chips including silicon wafers, photoresists, ancillary chemicals, wet processing chemicals, CMP slurries, atmospheric and specialty gases, thin film metals, and new chemicals and materials such as copper plating chemicals and precursor materials for low-k and high-k dielectrics.
Growth in the consumption of IC process chemicals is driven by increases in installed fab capacity—which has more than doubled over the past seven years, with the bulk of the new capacity at the 65-180 nm nodes—and processed silicon wafer surface area as well as by more expensive chemicals consumed by the new technology nodes. An increased technology efficiency provided by the semiconductor equipment industry is leading to a lower material usage per silicon wafer surface area while simultaneously well-proven and mature product lines from photoresists, wet process chemicals, atmospheric gases, CMP slurries and sputtering targets experience severe price pressures.
The following graphic is a representation of semiconductor development in accordance with Moore’s Law, and the trend toward “more than Moore”:
Driven by Moore’s Law for more than forty years, the semiconductor industry is developing and producing ICs with increased computing speed and less power consumption at lower costs. This has been accomplished by fabricating smaller feature sizes, by utilizing larger silicon wafer substrates and through engineering lower defect rates. As transistor dimensions approached nanoscale dimensions (below 100 nanometers), traditional electronic chemicals such as monocrystalline silicon, silicon oxide, aluminum or wet process chemicals for etching and cleaning encountered certain limitations. Electronic chemical companies were driven to develop new chemicals and formulations that enabled better performance—showing higher selectivity during etching and cleaning, or providing higher conductivity or lower permittivity.
A technology that makes it possible to create transistor geometries with nanoscale dimensions is 193 nm deep UV lithography, and the semiconductor industry will push this technology to its limits in order to generate features as narrow as 45 nm and possibly 32 nm. New deposition processes for thin barrier and dielectric layers by CVD (chemical vapor deposition) and ALD (atomic layer deposition) necessitated the development of new synthesis routes to produce fairly exotic molecules, in particular precursor molecules for the deposition of low-k and high-k dielectrics, barrier layers to prevent the migration of copper, and capping and etch stop layers to protect underlying structures.
Integrating these new materials has brought many challenges that have delayed their introduction. The number of new materials used in the 65 nm and 45 nm generations will undoubtedly grow further when scaling is continued. As these new technologies emerge, the suppliers of electronic chemicals will have to choose which materials they wish to develop and which tool and IC manufacturer to cooperate with, and provided their development project is successful, knowing that their product may be required only for a short time and in limited quantities. |
