In an industry reeling from the most extended downturn in its history, some things do remain constant: Semicon West is the must-attend event on the semiconductor trade show calendar. For the first time in recent memory, some exhibit-hall space continues to be available at press time. Despite the lack of the traditional waiting list of companies pining to get booths, SEMI says that more than 1400 companies plan to show their wares during the week of July 14. The show's schedule reverts to form this year, with the wafer-processing portion taking place Monday through Wednesday at the Moscone Center in San Francisco and the back-end segment following at the San Jose Convention Center Wednesday through Friday.

In addition to the usual display of equipment, subsystems, materials, and components on the show floor, the already-impressive array of symposia, standards meetings and workshops, and other sitdowns has been augmented with several intriguing new events and programs. MEMS takes a more prominent position this year, with two related conferences (cosponsored by SPIE) and a dedicated pavilion in the Moscone's Esplanade Hall playing host to a few dozen suppliers to the microelectromechanical manufacturing community. The Technology Innovation Showcase held Monday in East Hall presents some carefully selected companies and organizations with potentially enabling new technologies for the chipmaker and OEM communities (see related story on next page). A conference on the 2003 edition of The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) takes place Wednesday at the Westin St. Francis on Union Square, while the Fab Managers Forum convenes Thursday at National Semiconductor's facilities in Sunnyvale to air views on how to increase overall productivity.

Since some attendees and exhibitors want to unwind after the show grind and seek alternatives to the usual aftershow onslaught of hostility suites and schmooze-a-thons, here are the Web sites of some local media outlets: log onto www.sfgate.com, www.sfbg.com, and www.sfweekly.com for happenings in the City by the Bay, and try www.metroactive.com for what's going on in the Silicon Valley area. We also encourage you to come by and meet the MICRO team in South Hall, Booth 1605, and help us celebrate our 20th anniversary.

For more information on Semicon West, log onto www.semi.org.

Technology Innovation Showcase seeks to lower entry barriers to small companies, entrepreneurs

Innovation has always been at the heart of the semiconductor industry's storied achievements, from its earliest days in garages jammed with jury-rigged test benches to modern labs equipped with the latest analytical equipment. But often those small and start-up companies with a great idea or potentially valuable technologies from other industries have trouble getting the attention of the device manufacturers and capital equipment suppliers, many of which are struggling to innovate during the downturn with downsized R&D. In an effort to lower the barriers between the creators and the potential commercializers and end-users, SEMI will inaugurate the Technology Innovation Showcase (TIS) at this year's Semicon West. The one-day event will take place Monday, July 14, in the East Hall of Moscone Center.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF MOSCONE CENTER

The genesis of the showcase came from discussions held in SEMI's sales and marketing executive council (SMECS) as well as its enabling products services section (EPSS), according to industry veteran Dick Dryden, a key member of both groups. "Some people came up with the idea of a technology innovation showcase at a Semicon as a starting point rather than putting it on the Web...and present it so that anyone could come and listen and evaluate it, and then there would be context as to how they could proceed with it," explains Dryden. "The whole idea was to get a voice in the industry for some of these companies that do have innovative and new products and services that could be helpful, to get a voice in which a broader audience could hear them and then take action."

SEMI issued a "Call for Innovators" in late January, and the committee eventually received 72 applications from 65 companies, says Terry Francis, who leads the TIS selection efforts. Sixteen of the entrants will be chosen for the showcase. "Some are established companies, but the majority of these are start-ups.... Of the ratio here, I'd say it was about 70% new faces," Francis estimates. "We didn't want this to be a new product announcement for established companies.

"This is more like something where they're coming in with a new, innovative product or one that could have been an established product in another industry, but since the semiconductor industry is very NIH (not invented here), it could be new to this industry.... The key aspect is that we're looking for something that is no further along than alpha-level or prototype stuff. But it cannot be a released product."

Applicants have come from American, European, and Japanese interests with representation from such fields as aerospace, pharmaceutical, metallurgy, MEMS, and academia, note Dryden and Francis. The competing innovations include automation platforms, process control hardware and software, fab health monitoring systems, nanometrology tools, CMP consumables and analytical techniques, and several wafer-cleaning methods. In addition to being novel to the chipmaking community and in a preproduct stage, the technologies "must provide practical solutions to real problems" and "have data validating the innovation," according to showcase guidelines.

Each innovator selected will be given a small display space as well as a time-slot to present their ideas and inventions. "They'll get basically 30 minutes per paper, limited to 15 minutes per presentation, followed by Q&A," says Francis. "The format is, title slide, then one that tells what the product is and why it's innovative, then they've got two to three slides to illustrate the data that support this innovation, then the next one shows what needs the product addresses in the industry, and the last shows what the group wants to achieve by presenting their product."

Intellectual property issues "turned out to be not as big an issue as we thought it might be," notes Francis. "We were very careful on IP: SEMI as an organization could not sign nondisclosures, so we had to tell the innovators to protect their own IP. We did keep the vetting of the applications down to a narrow group of people though....We had no one back out because of IP."

If successful, the TIS could become a recurring feature of future Semicons and also evolve into Webcast-type presentations. "But we've got to make sure there's enough content and get a process in place for the vetting to make sure that this has some value added for the IDMs, OEMs, et al.," cautions Francis. "One of the complications of the vetting process has been to not let some of our historical biases get in the way. Because as we find out in many cases, these people are smarter than we are, and they may have found a new way of doing something where we said, 'I tried that and it doesn't work.' There's a place for wisdom, and there's a place for the entrepreneur who doesn't know what you can't do."—TC