A company with ambitions to revolutionize the manufacturing of semiconductors by moving away from today’s flat chips to spheres produced in a completely different way is about to reveal its secrets to the world. Ball Semiconductor Inc, based in Dallas, Texas aims to create semiconductors on 1-millimeter spheres in a single, enclosed process and dramatically cut the cost – and waste – of present production processes. The company claims to have proven the four initial processes for production of a sphere in which a layer of silicon oxide was grown on the surface of the sphere and a chemical vapor deposition process was used to deposit a thin aluminum film on the surface. Akira Ishikawa, the company’s president and chief executive officer, said this pushed them closer to the commercial production of a spherical semiconductor. The company is now preparing a more public disclosure of its technology with a conference in San Francisco next month. Given that Ball claims that its techniques can cut the cost of integrated circuit manufacture by up to 90 percent and reduce processing cycle times to days rather than months, even the most skeptical observers in the industry are likely to show up. The two men behind the formation of the company in 1967, Ishikawa and chief operating officer Hideshi Nakano, both came from senior positions at Texas Instruments. The backers are shrouded in mystery but it has been revealed that Japanese company Mitsui High Tech and semiconductor cutting equipment manufacturers Disco are investors. Ball’s roadmap envisages a pilot production line starting this year, trial production the following year and mass production beginning in 2000. What it has got going for it is that the essential move by the industry to larger 12-inch wafers is likely to cost more than $21bn. The time is right, says Ball, for ‘revolutionary innovation’ in semiconductor manufacturing technology. Ball, which has applied for patents covering its technology, plans to follow up a 1mm sphere by moving down to 0.8 and then onto 0.1mm and smaller. What it aims to do ultimately is produce spheres with different functions, such as memory, logic and power and then cluster the spheres together to build a system. Observers at the San Francisco conference will be able to judge whether a semiconductor revolution is at hand – or whether it is just a lot of hot air.
