Week In Review: Manufacturing, Test

Chipmakers
How bad is the slowdown in the IC industry? The memory market is terrible, while other markets are slowing. One company—Renesas–is feeling the brunt. Citing the IC slowdown, Renesas will temporarily halt production at 13 of the company’s 14 production facilities, according to a report from Nikkei.

Renesas confirmed the move. “Renesas is considering implementing measures to temporarily halt productions in accordance with the demand moving forward,” according to the company. “This includes options to suspend the front-end factories for up to two months and the back-end facilities for several times over a period of a week. Any specific shutdown period would be decided taking demand trends and customers’ delivery status into consideration.”

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Intel has recognized 35 companies in its annual supplier awards list for 2018. The list includes equipment and materials companies. These suppliers have collaborated with Intel to provide superior products and services.

Macom and GlobalFoundries have announced a strategic collaboration to ramp Macom’s Laser Photonic Integrated Circuit (L-PIC) platform using GF’s silicon photonics technology. The collaboration will leverage GF’s 300mm silicon manufacturing process to deliver cost, scale and capacity that is expected to enable mainstream L-PIC deployment for data center interconnects and 5G network deployments at 100G, 400G and beyond.

United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC) had a board meeting to set the agenda for its annual meeting. A brief summary of the discussion items were listed.

Samsung has commenced production of its first commercial embedded MRAM product. The technology is based on the company’s 28nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) process technology, called 28FDS.

Silicon Motion Technology has entered into a definitive agreement to sell FCI, its mobile communications product line, to Dialog Semiconductor.

Fab tools and materials
KLA has provided updated guidance for revenue and earnings for its fiscal third quarter ending March 31. The new guidance includes the contribution from Orbotech to combined company results for the 39 days remaining in the March quarter, following completion of the Orbotech acquisition on Feb. 20.

Merck KGaA has issued a letter to the shareholders from Versum. In its letter, Merck KGaA, said: “We are fully committed to pursuing our proposal. The Versum board should consider the best interests of its shareholders and engage with us.” Entegris recently announced plans to acquire Versum. Under the proposed plan, the combined company will retain the Entegris name and will be headquartered in Billerica, Mass. Last week, though, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany made an unsolicited proposal to acquire Versum.

Fujifilm Electronic Materials U.S.A. has broken ground on a major expansion of its manufacturing and development facility in Mesa, Arizona. The Mesa site expansion is anticipated to take around 18 months and will comprise of approximately 85,000-square-feet of additional space. The company supplies photoresists, developers, cleaners, etchants, solvents, low-k precursors, and CMP slurries.

SEMI-FlexTech has announced new project awards. The projects include thin batteries, printed audio speaker systems, and flexible fan-out wafer level packaging advances.

Advantest has won an Excellence Award in the Environmental Report division of the 22nd Environmental Communication Awards, co-sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of the Environment and the Global Environmental Forum.

Market research
Intel is expected to recapture its #1 semi supplier ranking in 2019, according to IC Insights. In 2018, Samsung surpassed Intel in terms of overall sales. “For 2019, a steep 24% drop in the memory market is forecast to pull the total semiconductor market down by 7%. With 83% of Samsung’s semiconductor sales being memory devices last year, the memory market downturn is expected to drag the company’s total semiconductor sales down by 20% this year. Although Intel’s semiconductor sales are forecast to be relatively flat in 2019, the company is poised to regain the number 1 semiconductor supplier ranking this year, a position it held from 1993 through 2016,” according to IC Insights.