EDITOR'S PAGE

Ping-ponging in my head

This year's Semicon West season finds business booming and memories of the last downturn nothing more than a bitter, dissipated aftertaste. Rather than replow the same ground as other industry observers and talk about changing economic models, tech stock jitters, DRAM undercapacity, 300-mm fab construction, or low-k defectivity issues, I'd like to share some odd concepts, questions, and observations that have been ping-ponging around in my head recently. It's my way of toasting SEMI on its 30th birthday and celebrating this month's MICRO, the biggest regular issue of our 18-year run.

Take the fickle nature of time in the chipmaking realm. Most folks are familiar with the concept of dog years, a bit of biologically based urban folklore that says there are seven canine cycles for each human cycle. Any dog-lover knows that the 7:1 ratio is only an average, since our loveable mutts age more quickly when they're young and more slowly in their golden years. What I would like to see is a dog-year equivalent for the rate of microelectronic progress—a "chip years" measure. Perhaps one could fashion an equation or model for semiconductor life spans by comparing them with the product cycle—from design through final manufacturing and eventual market life—of a Boeing jetliner or a Ford car. I challenge those statistically minded and temporally challenged readers to come up with a way to measure this elongation/contraction of time, or at least to comment on the possibilities. Selected contributions will be posted on a special section of MICRO's Website—www.micromagazine.com—in the next few months.

Speaking of time, when a tool company touts its equipment's throughput rates, I'm always curious what the "trueput" of the system really is. Not how many wafers per hour the tool can process when all subsystems are go and the line is humming like a new father. Instead, what's the true process rate when you factor in every single moment of idle time. It doesn't matter what causes it, whether it's lack of wafers, periodic maintenance, power surges, pump failures, robotic malfunction, or factory shutdown. Does a tool with 50% true uptime (that is, actually processing wafers for 12 out of every 24 hours) and an average wafer throughput of 80 wph really have a trueput of 40 wph over the course of a week, a month, or a year? What if that touted throughput of 80 wph is actually the maximum speed, and the wafers often run at a slower rate? How does one factor in the number of scrapped or defective wafers spit out by a particular tool or tool set? Plenty of industry metrics have been devised to deal with these issues—overall equipment efficiency, overall factory effectiveness, intrinsic equipment efficiency, total productive manufacturing—but consider trueput as a simple term that wraps up all these approaches in a nice bundle.

The e-commerce explosion reverberating through the semiconductor supply chain has enveloped many toolmakers and other suppliers. One of the unfortunate side-effects of this eruption is the spewing forth of some e-gregious assaults on my native tongue. Some of these new terms can work on one's free associational consciousness in strange ways. Here's an example. "Vortal" is an e-term, which means "vertical portal," a contracted word standing for a phrase that had little meaning to begin with. When I hear this word, it reminds me of a certain alien race from the recently completed Star Trek TV series, Deep Space Nine. The creatures were called the Vorta, a member species of the evil Dominion who served the Founders as administrators of their empire. If you watched the show, you know that the Vorta were cunning, unscrupulous beings, with a lot of bandwidth for deceit and empty promises. So, aliens who can't be trusted and e-marketers who can't be entrusted with the language.... Remember, if you can stick "e-" in front of common nouns or combine certain words in ridiculous ways, you're eligible to become a card-carrying Dot.Commie.

Tom Cheyney
Editor

tom.cheyney@cancom.com
http://www.micromagazine.com

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