Semiconductor equipment market to rebound 2007, 2008, says analyst
Peter Clarke
EE Times
(04/28/2005 7:38 AM EDT)
LONDON — The semiconductor equipment market will start to recover in the middle of 2006 but is still set to decline by 5.0 percent in that year following a fall of 9.6 percent in 2005, according to The Information Network (New Tripoli, Pa.).
Thereafter the semiconductor equipment market is set to achieve double-digit percentage annual growth of 20.5 percent in 2007 and 27.0 percent in 2008, driven by the needs of novel transistor and gate-level processing, the company said.
The market research company's short-term forecast was close to the one it gave Feb. 1, 2005, when it said the market would fall 9.4 percent to $30.7 billion in 2005 after a growth spurt of 52.7 percent took it to $33.9 billion in 2004,
Whereas the past semiconductor cycle focused on the back-end of the line processing utilizing copper interconnects and low-k materials, the next cycle — as the industry moves to 65- and 45-nm manufacturing processes is set to be driven by front-end of the line processes used to create ultra-shallow junctions, strained sources and drain through the use of silicon-germanium and complex gate stacks, The Information Network said.
"Significantly more equipment will be needed to process the transistor at 65-nm versus 130-nm," said Robert Castellano, president of The Information Network, in a statement. "For example, it will take 17 implant tools versus only seven for the ultra-shallow junctions. For the strained silicon-germanium source-drain, five epi reactors, two etch, and two clean tools will be required at 65-nm for a process that was not even implemented at 130-nm. For the gate stack, five integrated tools will be required versus only one oxidation furnace and one poly furnace."
The combined needs for these processing tools would result in annual market growth rates of following market declines of 9.6 percent in 2005 and 5.0 percent in 2006, The Information Network said.
For gate-stack processing, the equipment market was $843 million in 2004. Applied Materials led the market with a 54.8 percent market share, followed by Tokyo Electron Ltd. with a 19.5 percent share and ASM International with a 10.5 percent share, the market research company said.
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