From the editor's desk: The more things change ...

12 August 2015 News

With more and more specialist semiconductor foundries appearing and established brands, such as Samsung, expanding their third-party foundry offerings, the fierce competition in this arena is driving continual technological advances. When it comes to chip making, those advances typically come in the form of shrinking process nodes and growing wafer sizes.

The process node is essentially the scale down to which a semiconductor’s microscopic structures can be manufactured reliably – today’s cutting edge is 14 nanometres, with 7 nanometre processes currently in development. Wafers are basically circular crystals of semiconductor material that are ‘grown’ before going through the aforementioned processing to create a complete, packaged chip – the larger the wafers can be made, the more cost-effective the manufacturing process becomes. The biggest wafers commonly made today are 300 millimetres in diameter and 775 microns thick; 450 mm wafers are currently being developed.

The ever growing trend towards farming out semiconductor manufacturing operations to these foundries has created opportunities for startups and smaller players to get in on the action with relatively little risk. On the other end of the scale, though, the big keep getting bigger – unless they’re being bought, that is.

The latest massive acquisition announcement (following Texas Instruments buying National Semiconductor in 2011) was NXP Semiconductors’ takeover of Freescale in March this year, which will create a giant worth about $40 billion once the deal is done. It’s rumoured that the next big chip maker looking to sell is Atmel.

In this sometimes predictable but frequently topsy-turvy industry, it’s often the case that the more things change, the more they change.

Brett van den Bosch

Editor

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