SPIE 2010 - Panel Discussion: New Metrology in the Present Economy

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SeanHand Posted: Wed, Feb 24 2010 3:54 PM

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Great panel at SPIE 2010 last night.  Six panelists,  2 from research (IMEC and Univ. Tennesee),  2 from high volume manufacturing (IBM and Intel) and 2 equipment suppliers (Nanometrics and a start up,  tau-Metrics).   Basics of the panel discussion centered around a couple of key points

     How are small to mid size metrology companies to compete with larger companies in this economy

                   Summary response - From the manufacturing side,  the technology must enable yield.  It doesn' t matter if the technology is "disruptive", if it doesn't improve yield it's just another neat technology.  From the research side, they were obviously much more interested in the "disruptive" technology,  new information,  new data that they could not get before.  From the supplier side,  it was clear that currently,  the incremental improvements extending the lifetime of current technologies is the approach.  He cited the extension of CD-SEM and OCD when both of these technologies were seen as end of life in the present age.

    (in full discolsure the followin was my question to the panel):

      Both the manufactureres and the suppliers commented the the demo process and the sales cycle time has greatly increased for new technologies.   This is costly to both  the customer and the supplier in materials, travel and labor.  How can this process be improved to help both the supplier and customer meet thier needs.   (Ben Bunday,  panel chair,  then followed up with a more fundamental question:  Is the demo process broken?)

          Summary of response -   In general,  as would be expected IBM and Intel split on fundamental ideologies;  IBM in favor of collaboration Intel not so much and thus more along the line of that it is just the cost of doing business.   The demo process is not broken, but there are defintiely ways in which the process can be streamlined.  Some ideas that were proposed were standardizations on demo requirements, metrics of success and even so far as fomats of demo reporting.   Most of this was agreed to be on the manufacturer side rather than on the supplier side.   Research and suppliers didn't weigh in heavily on this but it was mostly due to running out of time.