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Bringing the Future into Focus Interviews with Industry Leaders A video shown at KLA-Tencor’s exhibit during SEMICON West 1998 featured interviews with industry leaders Mark MelliarSmith, President and CEO of SEMATECH, Dale Harbison, Vice President of the Semiconductor Group at Texas Instruments, and Sung W. Lee, President of Samsung Austin Semiconductor, on the challenges and issues the industry faces today. Below are excerpts from this video:

Mark Melliar-Smith, President and CEO of SEMATECH

KLA-Tencor: What do you see as the most critical challenges the industry will face in the next few years?

Sung W. Lee, President of Samsung Austin Semiconductor

Harbison: Today, feature sizes are shrinking and demands on speed and density of the circuits are increasing.

Post-optical lithography is a big challenge, because EUV, Scalpel and other X-ray techniques are very expensive; at the same time, we've got copper, we've got low-k, we've got all these things that are costing the industry large amounts of money.

Dale Harbison, Vice President of the Semiconductor Group at Texas Instruments

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Melliar-Smith: I think managing complexity is probably the biggest challenge this industry faces over the next decade. . . . Very often it will be harder to design a 100 million gate integrated circuit than it will be to make it.

And very often, in a factory, the process control technology is more difficult than the process itself.

Autumn 1998

Yield Management Solutions

Lee: Nowadays, prices are decreasing so fast we have to introduce our new products as quickly as possible. Ramp-up speed is the most critical thing for us.

KLA-Tencor: What about the impact of fast yield ramps on profitability? How is that driven by today’s economic environment?

Melliar-Smith: Fast yield ramps are crucial for a couple of reasons. The first tends to be very close to home. It's when you've built a $2-billion fab and your shareholders want a return on it. The only way to get a return on such a large investment is to ramp it very quickly. But equally important, your customers need a fast yield ramp as well. Typically they're looking for the highest technology and they want it quickly, to help their products come to market.

Lee: We‘ve already invested $1.5-billion here in this fab, so if we delay the product, interest and depreciation will cost us almost $10-million a month. How to build our fab fast, how to quickly ramp our production, and how to enhance our yield are the most important things.

Speed means everything in this business.

KLA-Tencor: What does “yield management” really mean? Why is it so important?

Melliar-Smith: The most important thing to understand about yield management is no surprises. It's not just a matter of data, it's a matter of reality. It's a matter of turning the data into what actually is going

on, inside the process or inside your fab.

What we really need to do in yield management is to look at the future, and where the process is at any point in time, to try to prevent the defects in the first place.

Lee: We have to heavily rely on the automated inspection equipment and the automated data collection systems to make our decisions more correct.

Harbison: Predicting results is very important, and that's what we want the yield management tools to do. . . . That's why it's so critical for us to have more automated and more advanced yield management tools, so that they can gather that raw data, massage it, digest it, and give it back to the fab people in a form that they can very quickly take action on and very quickly generate results.

KLA-Tencor: So what role will the industry play in the future?

Melliar-Smith: I think you're always ultimately limited by the human imagination in almost anything that you do. We've been able to facilitate whole new markets, like cellular telephony, the Internet, the PC — all of those technologies essentially have been made possible, and certainly cost effective, by integrated circuits.

If you are interested in seeing this video in its entirety, please circle reader service #29 on the BRC.

Autumn 1998

Yield Management Solutions

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