Interconnection


Ken Williamson, chief operating officer at PragmatIC


It’s not the end of an era for semiconductors, it’s a new beginning


There are ever increasing demands from the consumer to make things smaller and more convenient. As a result, electronic devices are becoming smaller with more densely populated printed circuit board (PCBs) assemblies. While this is largely positive in terms of technological advancement and usability, it does create some practical complications, especially when considering the PCB cleaning process


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any people in the industry believe that we are at the end of Moore’s Law and the ‘Golden Age’ of semiconductor


development. It has been claimed that, even back in 1999, there were concerns at Intel that making transistors smaller than 100 nm would result in fundamental problems with no known solutions! But year after year, engineers have managed to scale these difficult mountains and push on with smaller and smaller feature sizes, and consequently more complex and faster integrated circuits (ICs). We have moved from manufacturing with feature sizes of approximately 10mm in 1971, to 5nm 2020, which is an improvement of 2,000 times.


32 June 2020


The basic principles of traditional IC manufacture have remained the same, though. A perfect crystal of silicon is grown and sliced into thin wafers, then they go through an iterative process of material deposition, etching, lithography, and are tested and packaged. Then the finished IC is passed on to be assembled into new smartphones, TVs, cars etc. So why is it the end?


Well not the end, really, but there are two fundamental consequences of this technology advancement. First, the equipment required to make these increasingly complex ICs has become very sophisticated, employs thousands of robots and is commensurately very expensive. All of which has led to the


Components in Electronics


concentration of manufacturing in a small number of companies who can afford the $20B to build them. IC Insights notes that since 2009 over 100 semiconductor manufacturing plants have closed or been repurposed and in 2019 the largest manufacturer of all, TSMC, was the only one that managed to increase its revenue per wafer, mainly because it is the most successful at riding the new technology waves. This means that to work in such a plant, you probably need to move to Taiwan, China, or Korea to be at the cutting edge. Silicon manufacturing does still exist in Europe and the US, but the number of jobs in the US has fallen from over 450 thousand in 2006 to around 200 thousand in 2018.


The other consequence is that as feature sizes shrink, manufacturing and test costs rise, so cost efficiency is the #1 priority. With process and material costs making up around 45 per cent of a highly automated modern plant, the focus is on working everything to the max. This means that the main tasks for those running the fabs are maximising uptime and squeezing the last bit of yield out of each step of the process. So, where is the new beginning? Although silicon is ideal for highly complex processors and functions – as you can pack more into the same area effectively the cost per function goes down – the cost per millimetre squared of finished silicon is actually going up with the more sophisticated technologies. As older fabs are closed or repurposed to run newer technologies, designs have to be migrated across and, in some cases, they become what is known as IO-bound. This means that their size is determined by the number of IO pads around the perimeter, and the core function occupies less space than is available inside that perimeter. In these circumstances, the cost of the IC can increase as it is migrated.


What has been needed is a fundamental rethink about how lower complexity designs


can be manufactured at low cost. A pragmatic solution, something that does not require a whole new infrastructure of processing tools.


And so, to the new beginning. After several years proving the concept using the shared resources of CPI (Centre for Process Innovation) in Sedgefield, County Durham, PragmatIC raised investment to build our FlexLogIC fully automated, compact, self-contained, scalable production line to deliver ultra-low-cost flexible ICs (FlexICs). The first target market for which is RFID/ NFC devices, where our technology can reduce the total cost of the inlay (IC and antenna on a substrate) by up to 80 per cent. With our FlexIC Foundry offering it is also possible to design, test and iterate much more rapidly than with traditional ICs. And what’s next?


As we are ramping up production, we are already working on improvements for the next generation of FlexLogIC and advancing the technology of our FlexICs. RFID is only our first market, but it is a sizeable one, and eventually we expect to see tens if not hundreds of FlexLogIC lines located across the globe. Our vision is to enable a trillion smart objects over the next decade. pragmatic.tech


By Ken Williamson, chief operating officer at PragmatIC. Ken Williamson has more than 35 years’ experience within the semiconductor and electronics manufacturing industries. He has a profound knowledge across all aspects of high-tech manufacturing and a wealth of operational experience in taking new technology companies on to high volume manufacturing.


www.cieonline.co.uk


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