Regional MEMS Supply Chain Trends

Due to geopolitics and covid lockdowns the semiconductor supply chain started fracturing into regional centers of manufacturing over the last couple of years.?Governments did much to support this change. China began a process of building up its semiconductor infrastructure in the mid 2010’s with two Big Fund investments. Their goal was to reduced the amount of ICs imported into China for all the consumer and automotive products they were assembling for internal market and for exports. The US followed by the CHIPS Act as did the EU. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore all provided new support to their national semiconductor industry.

MEMS is a subset of the semiconductor industry and as such relies on much of the same infrastructure and supply chains that the IC industry does. MEMS products are made up of chips from MEMS wafers and ASIC wafers and packaging. Figure 1 shows the worldwide distribution of MEMS fabs.?More details on this can be found in the proceedings of the MicroFab Summit 2022 (1).?MEMS IDM are strongest in Europe with Bosch and ST Microelectronics leading the way.?ASIC fabs and OSATs are currently centered in Asia (2).

As we all know the COVID supply chain shock hit the consumer and automotive markets in 2020-2022.?The hit was especially hard at ASIC fabs but also impacted access to MEMS foundries.?Large companies bought up foundry capacity to build up inventories in 2021, leaving many mid to small size companies at a loss for wafers.?Startups were hard pressed to find foundry capacity since low volume lots were not prioritized. Projected process and product development times for new MEMS devices went from 1 year to 3 years. As Figure 2 illustrates, Yole found that the per wafer cost for low volume MEMS wafers increased to $2500 to more than $10,000 per wafer in 2022 (3). Million-dollar NRE charges for new MEMS processes are being quoted at some 8” foundries.?

Both startups and product development at most MEMS firms suffered in recent years.?Potential solutions around the ASIC wafer leadtimes and costs as well as package development are shown in Figure 3.?3D printing can be used to speed up MEMS packaged development.?Plastic cavity packages are easily produced with AM – Additive Manufacturing- using the same CAD files used in traditional package design. Even microfluidic packages can be fabricated quickly in days with this approach (4).?Printed circuit boards and FPGAs can be used to get around the ASIC shortage for development and concept samples.?

The problems experienced by many MEMS companies and startups have lead supply chain managers to re-evaluate the MEMS foundry used in development and at startups. 200mm wafers may not be the best choice for low volume manufacturing for the majority of the product development cycle.?Figure 4 illustrates how market segment and product maturity may point the company in a different direction with regard to MEMS foundry selection.

Only the smart phone, wearable consumer markets can support 200mm MEMS wafers and potentially 300mm MEMS wafers in the future.?A few larger automotive applications can be effectively made on 200mm wafers, but many may be just as profitable at 150mm.?Low volume markets like industrial, aerospace, medical and some automotive niches can be profitable using smaller diameter wafers.?Given the capacity crunch at 200mm MEMS foundries, the use of smaller diameter wafers may make sense for all segments of the MEMS universe at some point in the product development and manufacturing cycle.

For more information on MEMS supply chains and foundries contact M2N Technologies LLC- [email protected]?Also check out my workshop on “Trends Towards Regional & National Semiconductor & MEMS Supply Chains” put on by Microtech Ventures, January 19, 2023.

References

1. D.Sparks, “MEMS Fabs: Supply Chain Challenges and Emerging Trends” MicroFab Summit 2022, Microtech Ventures, Nov (2022).

2. D.Sparks, “Rethinking the MEMS Supply Chain & Foundry Business,” Model,”Commercial Micro Manufacturing, Vol. 15, No pp.22-27, Oct. (2022).

3. D. Damiaoos, “Trends in MEMS Manufacturing and evolution of MEMS foundries capabilities,” Yole Developpement, ?MEMS Manufacturing 2022, Microtech Ventures, ?Mar. (2022).

4. D.Sparks, “Biosensor Commercialization Strategies,” 6th International Conference on Biosensors and Bioelectronics, London, May (2022).