1.1 Semiconductor Industry Update

The semiconductor industry is firing on all cylinders. Worldwide semiconductor sales are predicted to grow by a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.2 percent from 2000 to 2004, reaching $316.2 billion as shown in Fig. 1.1. Sales remain strong across all product segments, including digital signal processors (DSPs), standard-cell application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), dynamic random access memories (DRAMs), microprocessors, and flash and telecom analog chips. The applications driving booming chip demand are personal computers, networking equipment, and wireless communications. The networking hardware market will grow to $104 billion by 2004, while the worldwide number of broadband subscribers will climb to $61 billion during the same time frame. The wireless communications market will reach $132 billion by 2004, while the total number of cellular handsets (cell phones) shipped will soar to 1.4 billion units.

Figure 1.1: Worldwide semiconductor revenue growth.

The region of fastest growing equipment consumption is the Asia Pacific region, led by Taiwan and South Korea, which have consumed $6.8 billion and $3.4 billion worth of equipment, respectively, in 2000. The Asia Pacific region will surpass the Americas as the largest equipment consumer by 2001, while Europe and Japan will both approach the $10 billion mark by 2002. There are almost forty 12-in. semiconductor fabrications (FABs) in the world. Two-thirds of these FABs are located in the Asia Pacific region, led by Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea.

1.2 System-on-a-Chip (SOC)

One of the 12-in. FABs future semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) products is system-on-a-chip...