Securing the Future Regional and National Programs to Support the Semiconductor Industry (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Panel 1: The U.S. Experience: SEMATECH
Panel 1: The U.S. Experience: SEMATECH
Pages 95-121
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From page 95... ...
McFadden said that the first panel would consider the experience of SEMATECH, which began in 1987 as a government-industry collaboration to promote certain technologies in the semiconductor industry. Noting that it has evolved to become International SEMATECH a collaboration of private companies on an international scale he observed that SEMATECH was an appropriate subject for this particular committee of the National Research Council because it has been a very visible and major technology partnership.
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From page 96... ...
Remarking that SEMATECH had a transforming effect in many ways, he cited specifically the fostering of an industry perspective on technology development, leading naturally to industry-wide testing of tools and standards and to the development of industry-wide technology roadmaps. He defined two main tasks of the symposium.
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From page 97... ...
I don't think the customers realized it was available until they started getting it from the Japanese industry." This discovery, he said, was "also disconcerting." Then the U.S. industry started to compile benchmarking data that allowed comparison of yields.
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From page 98... ...
Participating companies included nearly all of the largest semiconductor companies in the United States and their 14 appointed representatives to work with SEMATECH.4 4The original members of SEMATECH were IBM, Intel Corporation, Motorola, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Advanced Micro Devices, Lucent Technologies, Compaq Computer Corp., Hewlett-Packard Technology, Conexant Systems, NCR Microelectronics Corp., Harris Semiconductor, LSI Logic Corp., and Micron Technology.
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From page 99... ...
SEMATECH worked with these companies to develop reliable tools, to teach them total quality control, and to help them understand the needs of the industry and the increasing sophistication of the manufacturing process. Leadership in tools, particularly lithography tools, was then shifting away from the United States.5 SEMATECH began to recognize that much of the important work required to improve manufacturing equipment did not have to be done by each company individually but could be done by the 5Lithography is the process whereby a pattern is transferred to a photosensitive material by selective exposure to a radiation source such as light.
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From page 100... ...
The internal research of companies became more efficient, as they were able to reduce duplication and the number of blind alleys. Since then SEMATECH has succeeded in funding the development of new 300-mm tools and has taken a leadership position in pursuing the technology roadmaps designed by the Semiconductor Industry Association.
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From page 101... ...
The equipment suppliers invested in 300-mm equipment before the semiconductor device manufacturers were willing to accept the new standard. SEMATECH is also helping companies push the key technology of lithography to shorter and shorter wavelengths.
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From page 102... ...
As a result of their large market share in semiconductors the Japanese firms forced many of their competitors out of the memory market and into other markets. It was at this point that Intel abandoned the DRAM (dynamic random access memory)
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From page 103... ...
Dan Radack of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency asked whether SEMATECH would have formed without the original participation of the government, provided it had not been blocked by antitrust concerns.
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From page 104... ...
Moore. He did note an irony in the story: The Japanese VLSI projects of the late 1970s helped shape the concepts that led to SEMATECH.9 The Japanese VLSI projects, he said, were generally perceived as having played a significant role in bringing Japanese manufacturing technology and semiconductors up to world-class levels in the late 1970s.
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From page 105... ...
The Joint Venture Includes Information Sharing The canonical model of the broader form of cooperation that includes information sharing is the R&D joint venture. In the cooperative mode of a joint venture, firms not only set their R&D levels together but they also agree to perform i°Few researchers have empirically assessed the effects of joining SEMATECH on member firms' expenditures on private R&D.
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From page 106... ...
He pointed out that the economics literature has examined two scenarios under different levels of cooperation and sharing. The first set-up considers the outcome of a cartel versus competitive firms, whereas the second scenario examines the consequences of a competitive joint venture versus a cartel joint venture.
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From page 107... ...
· Picture of an R&D Joint Venture \ p=1 1` Eff. R&D1 FIGURE 4 Coordination and Information Sharing.
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From page 108... ...
Subsequently, this positive effect increases the overall amount of industry R&D. The conclusion, said Dr.
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From page 109... ...
The commitment hypothesis maintains that consortia such as SEMATECH obligate firms to contribute a larger amount to high-spillover R&D, while the sharing hypothesis implies that member firms will reduce the level of duplicative R&D. The researchers find support for the sharing hypothesis, which would lead one to the conclusion that government subsidization for R&D consortia was not justified.
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From page 110... ...
Conclusions The long-run impact of SEMATECH on company R&D suggests little about the social value of the consortium, because it does not indicate whether R&D has increased by the duplication of company efforts. Nor does it make clear whether the consortium was doing high-spillover projects that would not have been done i3A fixed-effects model is a statistical technique that allows the researcher to discern the influence that the individual firm has in determining the outcome of a dependent variable, which in this case would be total industry R&D.
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From page 111... ...
Polcari said he would discuss the technical challenges the computer industry is facing, the competitive landscape, and some resource issues. He called the technical challenges unprecedented.
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From page 112... ...
After a series of surprising improvements many people agree that this progress is likely to end at a wavelength of 157 nanometers, which would represent a gate length of 70 to 80 nanometers. Beyond that, he said, to achieve shorter wavelengths the industry would have to switch to other systems, such as electron beams or X rays.
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From page 113... ...
"This shows the advances we've made in the industry," he said, "where now you have to use transmission electron microscopes to show what you're looking at." He described the gate dielectric structure, with individual grains of polysilicon above and single-crystal silicon below, separated by the gate-oxide material SiO2. The thickness of the gate dielectric, he said, is approaching 25 angstroms.~5 He said the tolerance of the thickness of the gate dielectric is 10 percent, which means trying to control it to within 2 angstroms, "which is quite an amazing feat of technology." In the future engineers will need to reduce this thickness to continue performance improvements and scaling.
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From page 114... ...
Polcari underscored the importance of building the nation's groundwork in the basic sciences, notably materials sciences and interface physics, which must be better understood at semiconductor scales. Echoing the remarks of Dr.
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From page 115... ...
Government funding goes primarily to the long-term, high-risk research programs, while industry tends to fund the more short-term, tactical activities. He cited the danger of decreasing the longer-term, more basic research.
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From page 116... ...
He concluded by warning that the falloff in the engineering workforce comes at a time when the industry faces some of its most pressing engineering challenges. He urged the government to participate by applying funding to the area of academic research, both to stimulate research in long-term, high-risk areas and to stimulate the pool of graduate students in the field of semiconductor research.
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From page 117... ...
He suggested that this issue will take on added importance as the United States contemplates public funding of other collaborative government-industry ventures. i9The Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 calls all government agencies and programs to greater accountability by requiring annual performance plans and performance reports.
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From page 118... ...
Moore's suggestion that the commitment of federal financing appears to have a played an important catalytic role at the outset. It raised the expectations of prospective member firms, raised the profile of the collaboration itself, and may have encouraged the commitment of individual corporations.
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From page 119... ...
The research agenda for SEMATECH has been primarily medium term; member firms and other entities have tried to complement each other's investments in longer-term, medium-term, and perhaps near-term research. What is the time horizon across national programs and how does the research within the collaboration complement other research activitiesuniversity research, in-house research, research in government laboratories?
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From page 120... ...
He mentioned tentative evidence that the experience of SEMATECH assignees and their parent firms may differ from the experience of some of the Japanese participant firms' assignees in earlier projects, such as the VLSI programs. What are the career paths in the parent firm after an assignment with the consortium?
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From page 121... ...
THE U.S. EXPERIENCE 121 process, so member firms within the consortium become the assignees of the patents.
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