September 2004

September, 2004

Welcome to Thin Film Manufacturing News! I continue to struggle to attend to the tasks at hand and to keep in touch with the many people I meet at shows and conferences. This newsletter remains part of my answer and I’m resolved to publish it more frequently! It's a brief, bi-monthly look at some of the issues facing the industry, combined with links to helpful resources and now and then a bit of personal news.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Katherine’s Commentary
2. Best of the Blog
3. In Press
4. An Inside Peek
5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe
6. Forwarding and Feedback

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1. Katherine’s Commentary

Business here at Thin Film Manufacturing is booming. So much so that it's very hard to keep up with anything that isn't a current project with a looming deadline. It's the same problem that everyone in the industry faces during an upturn. How do you meet current demand while maintaining the long term efforts that help you build for the future? It's tempting to simply add staff, but then what do you do when the inevitable downturn comes?

In theory, the answers are pretty well known. Hold costs down. Minimize overhead. Maintain a stable research and development budget. We all do the best we can, but swings of 80% or more between peak and trough are well beyond the parameters of any business plan. The businesses that handle such swings the best seem to have at least one and possibly both of two key advantages.

The first advantage is bigness. Big companies with large sales and dominant market positions can build reserves to draw on when times are bad. Or that's the way it should work. Often, financial markets consider reserves inviolate, and insist that companies make the kind of painful infrastructure cuts that reserves are supposed to defend against. During good times, reserves might be derided as useless, wasted money that would be better spent on more infrastructure, acquisitions, or even a dividend.

The second advantage is diversity. The less your business depends on one customer or one industry the more able you are to weather the storms. Not every company can achieve bigness, but most can manage some measure of diversity. Remember that many big companies were tiny startups in niche markets once. The system you sell to a university at a deep discount may repay you many times over when the research lab makes a commercially important breakthrough. Service contracts and tool upgrades can provide a steady revenue stream when big sales dry up. Applications engineers can help find new niche applications. Some big companies sneer at small applications, but small companies can't afford to.

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2. Best of the Blog

Katherine's Blog (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/index.shtml ) is an almost daily selection of interesting links from around the web. Here are some of the highlights of the last few months.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2004_08_29.html A business plan is, first and foremost, a strategic document for the business. It doesn't do any good if it sits on the shelf. Here's a quick guide to writing a plan that actually gets used: http://www.sitepoint.com/article/business-plan-wont-sit-shelf

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2004_07_18.html Nikkei Electronics Asia has a brief, but interesting summary of recent developments in organic circuits: http://neasia.nikkeibp.com/nea/200407/mspe_316497.html.

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2004_07_25.html Nanometer-scale designs force designers and manufacturers to work together, even as complexity forces designers to seek more abstraction. Cadence has several white papers on their approach to the problem. http://nanometer.cadence.com/?lid=nanometer

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2004_07_25.html Isolating copper tools is relatively easy in a new fab, much more difficult in an existing fab. But, LSI Logic reports, copper integration into an existing fab is possible: http://www.a2c2.com/articles/0704micro.asp?pid=454&articleText=0704micro

https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/mtblog/mtarchive03/week_2004_08_01.html I wish I'd written this one. Michael Malone lets the air out of the nanotech hype:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.08/start.html?pg=2

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3. What’s In-Press

ThinFilmWiki (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/cgi-bin/usemod/wiki.pl?ThinFilmWiki ) is my online scratchpad. It's pretty rough, but the first chance to see what I'm working on while I'm working on it. Wiki pages are publicly editable and relevant comments are welcome. These are the areas I've been focused on recently.

Nanotechnology (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/cgi-bin/usemod/wiki.pl?NanoTechnology) and nanoelectronics (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/cgi-bin/usemod/wiki.pl?NanoElectronics), for an article to appear in the October issue of Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine.

Ink Jet Electronics (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/cgi-bin/usemod/wiki.pl?InkJetElectronics), by which I mean electronics printed by ink jet printers, not electronics used in ink jet printers. For a technology study commissioned by Pira Publishing. Scheduled for publication early in 2005.

Low-k Integration (https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/cgi-bin/usemod/wiki.pl?LowkIntegration), particularly integration of porous low-k materials, for an article to appear in the November issue of Semiconductor Manufacturing Magazine.

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4. An Inside Peek

Two rambunctious tiger kittens and an elegant elderly dilute calico joined the Thin Film Manufacturing staff this summer. Being cats, they demanded a site of their own. Admirers can visit the Summerhill Kitten Farm at http://www.kew.com/blog/kitten/

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5. Subscribe/Unsubscribe

To subscribe or unsubscribe, visit the newsletter home page at https://www.thinfilmmfg.com/newsletter/index.htm

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6. Forwarding and Feedback

Ours is an information service. If you are experiencing problems, challenges and issues with which you think our research can assist, we need to know. We want to know what you'd like to know about. If you've seen some valuable information here that a friend needs, they need to know. Please feel free to copy or distribute this newsletter in its entirety to all interested parties.

Katherine Derbyshire
kderbyshire@thinfilmmfg.com
https://www.thinfilmmfg.com