INDUSTRY MANUFACTURING
industry, research institutions and the European Commission discussed the situation and possible strategies to re-strengthen Europe’s competiveness in the semiconductor value chain.
In his presentation, Barnett Silver, Senior Vice President and Principal of advisory firm ATREG, provided a sound analysis of the current situation and its consequences. During the evolution of the semiconductor technology over the past decade, chip geometries shrunk from 130nm in 2001 to 22nm in 2012. In the same period, the costs to build a leading-edge fab climbed from $1.3 billion to $7 billion, an increase of 440 percent.
This cost explosion deprived many chipmakers of the ability to maintain production in-house. In this period, the number of players able to run leading-edge manufacturing lines fell dramatically - from 19 firms to just four in 2012.
The next fab generation is associated to the transition to 450mm silicon wafers and to EUV lithography, and again, both technologies are considered as extremely capital-intensive. The investment for the construction of fabs able to handle these technologies is estimated at $10 billion. “It is obvious that amounts of eight to ten billion dollars can hardly be raised anymore by any single company or even by single nations”, comments SEMI Europe President Heinz Kundert.
This dilemma also led to the development of two incompatible strategies within the European chip industry: On one side, there is the “More Moore” group, advocating a strategy that adheres to Moore’s Law. The other camp bets on the design
of cost-optimized and value-added semiconductor solutions, a strategy for which the expression “More than Moore” has been coined. The “More Moore” strategy includes, among others, the transition to more powerful and complex production lines, which can process 450mm semiconductor.
This move will boost productivity, but only the top league of manufacturers will be able to finance these factories - and this strategy inherently bears substantial risks. The “More than Moore” strategy, in contrast, basically capitalizes on existing technologies and abilities and avoids these risks. The incompatibility of these two strategies is increasingly seen as a risk in itself since it intensifies the fragmentation across the European industry.
In this situation, voices are being raised calling for joint efforts from the industry and for more support from the side of politics at European level. The European Commission started to show increased understanding for the difficult situation of the European semiconductor industry several months ago when European Commissioner, Neelie Kroess, suggested a European effort to boost Key Enabling Technologies (KETs) in order to strengthen the competiveness of Europe’s industry. As one of these KETs, she identified semiconductor manufacturing.
Inspired by the success of Airbus Industries in the seventies she sub-sequentially aired a concept of an “Airbus for chips”. Much like Airbus Industries led to a revival of the European aerospace industry in the seventies, the Airbus for chips could reinforce the position of the European semiconductor industry in the
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www.siliconsemiconductor.net Issue I 2013
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