Novellus confident about PECVD market
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Claire Sung, Taipei; Esther Lam, DigiTimes.com [Tuesday 3 April 2007]
Having landed orders from the top-two foundries for its plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) systems on 65nm wafer production, Novellus Systems is confident that its systems are capable of meeting requirements for 65nm following satisfactory customer feedback, according to company executives.
Novellus has introduced a multi-station sequential deposition (MSSD) architecture to control wafer heat-up independently from film deposition, leading to improvements in overall film quality and processing time. Julian Hsieh, company senior director at product management of PECVD and gapfill business unit, highlighted that Novellus' MSSD architecture proved to be capable of boosting chip output by 40% and productivity by 30%.
The number of thin-films required grows by 10-20% with each process generation migration and the thickness will decrease more, said Hsieh and Eric Tsai, Novellus Taiwan president. At 45nm for instance, about 70% of thin films will have a thickness less than 1000A (or 100nm).
Novellus' PECVD systems have already landed orders from the two leading pure-play foundries Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) for 90nm ICs production, the executives noted. They are confident that the company's systems are capable of producing chips on 60nm and below processes.
Novellus is confident about the PECVD market, predicting the market size will surpass US$6 billion over the next five years, Hsieh said. In terms of customers, demand for logic IC will remain stable and demand from memory ICs should also grow amid Windows Vista impact and capacity expansion on NAND flash, he added.
Company revenues growth is set to outpace the growth that TSMC and UMC spend on capital expenditure (capex) in 2007, Tsai noted. Novellus is well positioned in 2007, especially in Taiwan, given that both TSMC and UMC will continue growing their capex mildly and memory makers are aggressively expanding output.
Novellus records its sales reached US$1.66 billion in 2006 with over a quarter of the revenues (at 26%) coming from the Greater China region. Of the total sales from Greater China, Taiwan contributed 80%, Tsai detailed. |
