The continuous progress of technology nod poses higher requirement for the equipment industry. Currently, there are two forms: first: progressive way, which is achieved by relying on technology accumulation and shows advantage to current manufacturers. Another is innovative form. For those old and new entrants, all has the same opportunity; what they competes is the overall development capacity, the speed entering market, the grasp to practical application as well as the cost control competence. At present, 3DIC technology is innovative propulsion, which blurs the boundary between traditional front procedure and back procedure.
For equipment enterprises, the test brought by technology boost is: who can integrate the front and back resource faster, introducing optimized solutions, and achieve mass production to meet the customer demand. In the future, the entire equipment industry will move toward this direction.
The competition of the whole industry generates the spiral vertical integration
With the semiconductor industry entering the competition of the industry chain as a whole, equipment industry also need strengthen the cooperation between the upstream and downstream. Such cooperation has two ways: one is to return to the traditional vertical integration, including combining processing, packaging and testing equipment manufacturing.
In fact, it is a fully integrated way early in the industry. A company covers design, manufacturing, testing and other links, the reason of which is the thin profits, so bundled fusion is needed. With the growingly increase of profit in various links, enterprises begin to only maintain the major part and separate the secondary industry. For instance, Intel separated equipment, focusing on the main chip production; IBM moves the opposite way, focusing on its strength-research & development, and dividing chip production.
Another mode is to see small-scale workshop production in the future. Due to multiple technology, less production, monolithic chip processing increases, batch of processing becomingly less and less, this will a trend. In the future, given less equipment, many processes, the entire production line will become very simple; the cost also will be very low. Then design enterprise can buy some equipment to do the work themselves, designing, and producing and selling chip, which returns to vertical integration. But this integration is a spiral rising, rather than mechanically vertical integration, this is also the future direction.
Tags：
Semiconductor Industry,multiple technology