EDITOR'S PAGE

Forecasts, futurists and fools

As cobalt-blue skies and unseasonably warm breezes beckoned duffers to the Spanish Bay links, SEMI's annual North American Industry Strategy Symposium countered with an impressive lineup of forecasters, futurists, and other fools banking on a semiconductor ecosystem recovery. While many market and technology analysts focused on the traditional hot-button areas of chipmaking and equipment manufacturing, the materially minded speakers offered the most potent take-home messages. That, and Jeremy Rifkin's stunning keynote prediction of the end of the market economy as we know it.

Bob Helms, International Sematech's skipper, made clear that materials solutions, not lithography shrinks alone, will dictate whether the industry successfully deals with the complex array of sub-90-nm process node challenges. Transistor performance improvements, Helms pointed out, will hinge on the successful integration of silicon-on-insulator, strained silicon and other channel mobility enhancers, high-k dielectric gate insulators, metal gates, and fully depleted SOI.

Last year's market totals revealed the surprising clout of the materials side compared to the down-in-the-dumps tool contingent. Both SEMI's Dan Tracy and IC Insights' Bill McClean reported that the materials sector actually garnered more revenues than the equipment space in 2002. The wafer fab materials segment will get even stronger this year, with Tracy projecting nearly 12% growth. Silicon wafers, CMP consumables, and especially new materials like low-k dielectrics, precursors, and copper plating solutions should enjoy robust double-digit increases.

Although great opportunities exist for risk-tolerant companies to participate in what he calls "the decade of materials," Tracy warned that certain driving forces behind the market might cause some to exit the electronics business. New materials have small lot sizes and reduced market potential, yet require more manufacturing flexibility. The exotic stuff must be continuously improved to ever-higher purity levels, have better resolution capability, achieve enhanced yields, and be more environmentally benign to boot. Throw in the whims and desires of the average electronics consumers, now kingpins of the chip-market demand side, who want feature-rich yet affordable gadgets (exhibit A: sub-$100 DVD players), and the materials supplier sees its profits squeezed as R&D costs escalate.

The large industrial chemical companies may decide to chuck their electronic materials and specialty businesses—which don't account for a high percentage of their overall revenue anyway—if faced with paltry returns on their investment dollar. It's clearer than ever that the materials guys can't go it alone. Thankfully, development partnerships by various combinations of IC makers, materials companies, equipment suppliers, and consortia may help keep the industry on the technology development curve that Dr. Moore established nearly 40 years ago.

By staying on track, the semiconductor community will capitalize on the copious chip-, MEMS-, and nanogizmo-driven applications coming in what Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future calls the fourth age of technology—biology. Think of the processing requirements for drilling deep into human genome data, or consider the proliferation of wearable or implantable biosensors, connected wirelessly to real-time, interactive health services networks, and you have an idea of the market potential materializing over the next decade.

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On a festive note, MICRO turns 20 this year. When the first copies of what was then called Microcontamination were distributed in May 1983 at Semicon West in San Mateo, the magazine faced long odds for survival in the risky world of business-to-business publishing. I'm happy to report that nearly two decades later, MICRO is weathering the economic vicissitudes of the double-whammy downturn dogging both the trade media and semiconductor manufacturing sectors.

The May 2003 edition will be our official birthday issue, with special content and marketing features celebrating our success and perseverance. As part of our anniversary festivities, we'd love to hear from you, the readers, about what you think of the magazine, memories of issues or articles past and characters now forgotten, "then vs. now" comparisons of technology over the past 20 years, and what might be waiting just beyond the vanishing point in the next 20. If you have any recollections, observations, prognostications, or other feedback, please send them to me via email. We'll include some of the more pithy and perceptive comments in our birthday issue and on our Web site.

Tom Cheyney
Editor
tom.cheyney@cancom.com

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