Semiconductor Industry

Dear fellow alumni,

Today, I would like to share a personal experience with you.
My personal experience in the Semiconductor industry started two decades ago at AMD. At that time, I was so "green" that I do not realize that I was venturing into an industry that was going to shape the way we do business, change our lifestyle and communicate. It was so new to me even when it was already 4 decades old. Everything looks so new to me.

So, it struck my mind to share this article with all of you, just in case you have not heard about this industry.

As time pass, I realized that this is a fast paced industry. The pace was governed by Moore's Law (A 1965 prediction by Gordon Moore, Intel's Co-Founder). Moore's Law, states that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. Intel has kept that pace for almost 4 decades, leading the way and on hot pursuit by other Semiconductor manufacturers (source: http://www.intel.com/technology/mooreslaw/ ).

To most of us, we take for granted that mobile phones, LCD TV, DVD player, MP3 player, computer and digital watch are just ordinary inventions out of needs. But, I would like to point out that these miracle electronic gadgets would not be invented if the silicon-germanium junctions transistors were not discovered.

The Semiconductor history started with the discovery of the Si-Ge transistor by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Laborotary in 1947. The discovery paved the way to miniturisation of gadgets. Today, the central processor unit (cpu), the brain of a computer is only 2" x 2" x 0.25" in size, weighed only 100 grams and constructed over 800 million transistors. The first computer, ENIAC weighed 27 tons, was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m by 0.9 m by 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²) of space was commissioned in 1946.
(source:http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Andrew_Wylie/history.htm source: http://www.intel.com/technology/timeline.pdf)

The Semiconductor industry is ranked 20 out of the Standard & Poor Top 500 Ranking, registering monthly sales of US$ 23 billion until Sept., 2008 when the world faced an economic meltdown Sales after then had been sluggish and demand for Semiconductor chips had suffered a drastic decline.
(source:http://www.businessweek.com/pdfs/2004/0414_bw50industries.pdf source :http://www.rncos.com/Blog/2008/11/Growth-in-Global-Semiconductor-Sales-Dying-Down.html ).

Anyway, we would not have computers, laptops, PDA, cell phones, blackberry, digital cameras, ipods, calculators and many other gadgets without Semiconductor industry. Imagine a world without them. Maybe life would have been simpler.

Embeded within these gadgets are semiconductor chips made from silicon wafers and interconnected with tiny aluminium, gold and copper wires of sizes as small as 20um diameter, ten times smaller than the human hair by wire bonders.

The following video shows a wire bonder in action. This equipment is capable to placed 100 mils long gold wires of 25um diameter at the rate of 16 wires per sec.





Let us hope the economy will improve by end 2009 and more trendy gadgets will be available by then. Till then.

Cheerios!

Pls forward any enquiry to:
JL Chew PMA., MBA., DBA.
email : jl_chew@hotmail.com