Read our International Electronics Forum 2008 News Roundup
Large area processing, like solar panels, flat panel displays and coated glass, was the subject of the talk given by the CTO of Applied Materials, Dr Mark Pinto, to the International Electronics Forum 2008 in Dubai this morning.
Entitled: ‘Applying Nanomanufacturing Technologies Beyond The IC’, Pinto insisted that he had not chosen the subject-matter “because of the doldrums we’re in in the IC industry today.”
However, the implication is that large area processing, rather than IC processing, is where semiconductor equipment companies are looking at the moment. And the reason for that is clear. “Scaling has been the primary cost driver for ICs, but cannot come at an overcompensating increase in cost/area”, said Pinto., “the driver is the number of bits you can get in a unit area, but process cost has to be kept relatively flat in order to get constant cost reduction.”
For instance, pointed out Pinto, a 20 inch LCD cost $1,000 in 2004, a 42 inch display costs $1,000 today and in 2011 a 60 inch display will also cost $1,000.
But Pinto’s main focus is clearly photovoltaics. He quoted Thomas Edison who said, in 1931: ‘I’ve put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.’
It could be close-run, but the trends are in the right direction: the cost per Watt is decreasing while the size of solar cell fabs goes up. Currently these are 50-100MegaWatt, but GigaWatt fabs are expected in 2010.
Driving Applied’s interest in solar, is a production equipment market expected to be worth $6bn a year in 2010, according to Pinto.
The speaker following Pinto, Waguih Ishak, vice president at Corning, took the same view about the promise of solar production saying there are over a hundred start-ups in Silicon Valley going in for photovoltaics. “There are many entrepreneurial professors with companies in stealth mode working, not on devices, but on energy storage”, said Ishak.
Asked by Electronics Weekly about the medium term future for some of the new materials like graphene, and carbon nanotubes, and the new technologies like quantum dots and IBM’s Racetrack memory, Applied’s Pinto replied: “There’s promise for some of these things. Some of the more exotic structures will find their place in memory before the switch. For the switch there are so many things you need to trade off. Carbon nanotubes could play a significant role in energy storage.”
See also: the Electronics Weekly focus on solar cells, presenting a roundup of content related to photovoltaic technologies, converting light sources to energy.
See also: Mannerisms, the blog of David Manners. Updated twice daily, it's the distinctive, entertaining, authoritative and never dull commentary on the semiconductor industry, from someone who knows. Sign up for the Mannerisms eNewsletter.