KLA-Tencor Weathers Storm, Builds for Future
Despite recent bad news and worse forecasts, long term prospects for semiconductor manufacturing remain bright. When the upturn comes, it's likely to come quickly, as IC companies launch their long-delayed expansion plans. In the interim, company managers are faced with a tradeoff between conserving resources to preserve profits and maintaining infrastructure and market position for the next growth phase.
According to Jon Tompkins, chairman of KLA-Tencor (KLA; San Jose, CA), maintaining support for key initiatives is essential when weathering a downturn. His company plans a steady flow of new products and acquisitions to fill out its yield management portfolio.
For instance, in June KLA acquired VARS Inc. (San Jose, CA). That company's image archiving and retrieval systems will become part of the Yield Management Software Division, supporting the Klarity data analysis software and Quest data management tools. In February, KLA acquired Nanopro GmbH (Freiburg, Germany), a company specializing in advanced interferometric technology for wafer shape and thickness measurements.
As Tompkins explained, "It's becoming more difficult to differentiate a point product in the marketplace." KLA plans to link inspection, software, and consulting products into a compelling yield management package.
Yield management consulting is an important, and profitable, means to this end, Tompkins told Semiconductor Online. Through varied experience in many different fabs, KLA has a good idea of the yield-related performance of various tools and sets of tools. The company can help a customer evaluate its tool set and decide what tool performance to expect.
For instance, the TwinStar Semiconductor (Richardson, TX) fab, since sold to Micron Semiconductor (Boise, ID), was built as a joint venture between Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) and Hitachi (Tokyo). The venture, managed by Texas Instruments using a Hitachi process, delivered yields well below those of Hitachi's mother fab. KLA consultants helped identify problems tool by tool, raising yield to the expected level.
Despite the advantages, deploying such comprehensive yield packages has been difficult. For example, software and data interfaces to older inspection tools tend to be clumsy and difficult to modify. Integrating older systems with advanced defect classification and data management software has been slow and difficult, Tompkins said.
On the positive side, about 25% of the company's sales come from the reticle inspection and data storage markets, both of which tend to move counter to the semiconductor fabrication market. During the 1992-93 downturn, Tompkins told Semiconductor Online, in some weeks the only products sold were to non-semiconductor companies.
For more information: KLA-Tencor Corporation, 160 Rio Robles, San Jose, CA 95134. Tel: 408-875-4200, fax: 408-571-3030.
By Katherine Derbyshire