Extended Abstracts of the 1999 International Conference on Solid State Devices and Materials, Tokyo, 1999, pp. 6-7

PIenaryR&D Challenges and Chance in Today's Japan

Seiki Ogura sogura@ halolsi.comHalo LSI Design and Device Technology lnc.

140 Old Hopewell Road, Wappingers Falls, NewYork, 12590

Crisis in Japan's Semiconductor Industry Only a shortwhile ogo, Japan's semiconductor industry was rankednumber one in the world. However, Japan quickly lost itscompetitive edge as the yen grew too strong against othercurrencies. h addition, technical excellence diffusedinternationally as equipment makers became the technologysuppliers and the providers of process recipes. Thus thenumber one position for DRAM manufacturing shifted fromJapan to Samsung in Kore4 and Micron in the US. The USregained strengttr with the help of a weak dollar and a sfiongPC business led by Intel. TSMC and other Thiwan companiesstarted a foundry business based on ASIC manufacturingservice for fabless design companies, and have subsequentlyestablished themselves as the world's standard in logictechnology. Europe also, has been gaining strength through aseries of co-operative projects coordinated by the ECgovemme,nt (ESPIRIT). In 1998, three Ewopean companieswere listed among the top ten in the world, and at this rate,Europe may soon be able to challenge the US.R&D Reduction Japan on the other han4 is now forced tomaintain cost competitiveness among these emergingcounties. The Japanese semiconductor indusfy suffers fromloss of market to the emerging countries and huge losses dueto cheap DRAM prices. In response to this crisis, theJapanese industry has been restuctrning by cutting newinvestme,lrt for research projects, to reduce product cost.Urgent Alliance Research and development is necessary forJapan's future competitive,ness. h order to offset thereduction of investment in R&D, an alliance amongindustries is the only solution. Some cooperation betweencompanies has alredy been observed. Establishing theserelationships is not easy, because gains by cooperation maynot be immediate, ild conflict over market shares may becaused instead. But it is necessary to build alliances on aneven larger scale, considering today's competitive globalenvironment. Once an alliance has been formed, source offunding is next issue. If the alliance is lacking funds, then itneeds to turn to the private and/or government sectors.R& D Fanding by Private Sector, fapan us. US In theUnited States, risky research and development projects areconstantly initiated by new ventures, because investors chasedreams and are forgiving of failures. Also, the success of afew companies such as Netscape, Yahoo, Broadcom, andRambus can make up for several billion dollars of otherinvestment losses. Recently, the Japanese governme,nt hasbegun to sponsor university faculty and students, with hopesof yielding such new billion dollar ventures in Japan. But itis not popular to change jobs in Japan, and the lack ofexperie,nced resources, and the lack of interaction withindustries, ffid the conservative nature of Japanese investors,as well as the consumeros taste for brand names, make itdifficult to larurch a successful 'bver-nighf' venfire. Socialculture in Japan has been changing, but the investor's cultureremains conservative, especially conSidering recent bankingsector restructuring. Here the enviable chinese investor's

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attitude should be noted; emphasis is placed on collectingprofit, and there is less concern for the original investmentmoney. This attitude is also ideal for new ventures.Government Role For large-scale projects, which areoutside of the scope of individual companies and privateinvestors, it is important that the government intervenes andfunds activities to at least the same level as in the EuropeanCommunity. In Europe, the availability of government-assisted funds e,lrcourages cooperation between industriesand companies. Also, these funds (blood tax money), shouldbe directed to industies and universities in order to worktowards enabling main steam technology for the nextgeneration, not only on the pure academic interest projects ofthe past. The total sum of R&D resources in industry isbelow a critical level, so it is especially important that theresources and activities of universities supplerne,nt industy'sneed. Communication between industry and universitiescould be improved if industry is responsible directly for thegovemm€,lrt funded university activities. The sfrength of suchan arrangeme,nt has been successfully demonstrated by thegrowth of Europe's indusfiry in the recent years.Immedine Co-operative Project The conventional silicongate structure of today's CMOS technology can be extendedfrom 0.18u to 0.13u by simple improvements in lithography.However development of new device structure is neededbeyond O.hA in order to solve fundamental problems such asresistance at the shallow junction, silicide of the poly gate,and current drive at low voltages. Development of this new<0.lu device structure is treme,ndous task, suitable for a jointco-operative effort. Because the large capital is needed forsuch a project governme,lrt funding and authonty is necessaryfor large-scale technology development.Culture Change Needed and Search for New ResourcesEffective utilization of all resources, students, women andearly retirees is also important, especially as the average ageof the Japanese population is increasing. The number offemale engineers in Japan is especially low compared toother countries. In the US, almost half of the new engineersat IBM and Intel are female. In order e,ncourage femaleengineering talent, social culture and education during youthneeds to change. It is also important to utilize the increasingpopulation of retired e,ngineers. A hands-on retrainingprogram from private and government funds, prior toretirement, may create experie,nced resources.Importance of Anticipating Change Finally, correctanticipation of changes in technology hends is necessary forsurvival. Continuing along the extension of a current path isrelatively easy, but it is very difficult to predict the rightstrategy when technology changes direction. The rlghtdecisions are essential for survival, and may have greatfinancial potential, but wrong decisions can be fatal.Lost Opportunities For example, let's look at Japan's recentDRAM crisis. Although DRAM business has always beencyclical in nature, a closer look at technology trends showsthat over the past twenty years, DRAM chip density has been

increasing by four times every three years, in accordancewith Moore's Law. The system memory size of a PC on theother han4 has been increasing at only half of that rate.Considering these two trends, the system memory sizes ofsome sets will be smaller than the chip memory size aroundthe year 2000. Thus, embedded memory and logic on asingle chip has been emphasized recently. However inbusiness, a time lag is required to establish new markets.Over capacity and the subsequent price drop should havebeen anticipated, especially whe,n new capacity was added inFar East Asia and Ewope. But management in mostcompanies wasn't able to foresee the technology and marketsifuation correctly, and so Japan's economy rose and fellwith the DRAM market.

Another example of unong strategy occurred in the1980's. While IBM and Japanese industries were fighting fordominance of mainframe computing and bipolar technology,Intel was able to subconfact its XCCPU 8086 over IBM'sintemal CPU. IBM and Japanese industies lost a significantopportunity in their failure to recognize the importance of theCMOS CPU.Personal Opportunities in IBM h 1983, I was working onCMOS within IBM. At that time, PC's based on FET werealmost two orders slower than mainframes based on bipolartechnology. Then the performance improvement of FETbased systems was increasing at a rate of two times per year,and the mainframes were improving more slowly at twotimes every four years. Despite the disbelief of the bipolargroup, according to the trends, the cross-over between FETand bipolar performance was expected around 1990. At thattimg the advantage of the bipolar device came the shortchannel lettgth of the base -0.2u, which was formed by thediftrsivity difference between boron and arsenic. We workedhard to define a shmter FET channel to matdr the bipolarbase width. Although the minimum lithography feature at thetime was 1.2u, by developing a side wall spacer technique, achannel length of 0.35um could be defined. Punch througheffects were contained by addition of boron pockets, thus thepresent day halo LDD structure was invented.

At about the same time, lithography suffered from depth offocus due to wafer warping anO ievice topology. My bossJack Riseman asked me to utilize Chemical MechanicalPolish process, when he leamed that big astrology telescopelenses, several meters in diameter, could be polished to anaccuracy of within a quarter of a wavelength. I did not thinkthen, that warping of only a few microns was a significantproblem, but Jack anticipated a future in wtrich the CMpprocess would eventually be needed. We developed the firstShallow Trench Isolation and Damascene processes for metalwiring, and our SRAM which utilized f6lo LDD and STI,was able to match bipolar performance, convincing us thatthat ulfra shut channel CMOS technology with lower power,would someday prevail over bipolar. But it took some timefor this idea to gain acceptance within IBM, because IBMwas busy struggling against Japan for mainframe dominance.Thus, although CMOS was already under developmentwithin IBM, IBM lost the PC business to lntel.Rigfu AAion at the Right Time If wrong decisions are lostopportunities, then detection and focus at critical changingpoints are vital business chances as well. For example,several years ago in the United States, e-mail services startedby using open lines during offpeak hours to deliver over two

orders more information for the same price as a voice phonecall. At the time, I personally did not believe such a servicecould be extended to the general population, because the linecapacity was too limited. However, other more far-sightedpeople recognized this contradictory phenome,na as theopportunity of a life time, and thus the Internet Age wasbegun as almost overnighg new communication ventureswere established. Illinois University stude,nts capitalized onthe ordinary household user's demand, and added functionand convenience to what was once a shareware GUI browser,to build Netscape, which is now a billion dollar company.Many other hardware and software companies were startedup and spun off, featuring ne\M techniques for datacompression, and data transfer, to support higher data rates.Responsibility for Anticiparion is Everybody's! TheInternet Age was able to begin in the United States, not onlybecause venture capital was available, but also becauseindividuals took on the responsibility of anticipation, to formsuccessful companies. [n Japan too, more emphasis shouldalso be placed on the individual researcher. New ideas andinnovations are most likely to be achieved by the hands-onworker, so it is important for researchers to be aware offends and to anticipate shifts.Perconal Anticipation After retiring from IBM, I started acompany based on a new idea for flash memory. The role offlash memory has been increasing with the popularity ofportable products and rapid market expansion is expected.However, unlike DRAM's stack capacitor cell, there aremany different tlpes of flash device structures, ffid auniversal solutiur has not yet been reached. Also flashapplications suffer from high voltages, slow program timeand limited endurance. A geat opportunity will be rewardedif a fundamental solution can be found. h certainapplications, DRAM could be replaced and other newapplications could be enabled. Our new venture challengesthese fundamental issues in two parts, the first part consistsof fast read and fast program at low voltages for embeddedapplication and the second target is fast program, highdensity flash for mass storage applications. Time will tell ifour anticipation and assessment oftre,nds are correct.For Tbday ond Tomonow Regarding the futwe of Japan,let's look at the trend of PC sales. Until now, each new CPUgeneration has been more powerful than the previousgeneration. Recently however, Celeron-based notebooks areoutselling the new Pentium III desktops. This performancereverse shift may be indicative of a major change- from theAge of the PC, to the Age of the smart consumer product.Strong activity on intelligent wireless and mobile systemssupports this idea. Clearly, system size has been decreasing,from mainframe to PC, and PC to notebook. In networkcomputing, the decentralized local intelligence paradigm isreplacing ce,ntral computing. Japan's strength in consumerelectronics may be a significant asset for this new frend.Summary In order to reactivate the Japanese industry, analliance among indusfiies, ffid collaboration betweenuniversities and industries are important. More activity isneeded for O.lu main stream technology R&D and taxmoney is needed to fund for these activities. Success willdepend on focusing these efforts on winning technologyelements. The winning technology is a product of constantre-evaluation, comparing of altemative options andcontinuous improvement by individual researchers.