SAN DIEGO, Nov. 27, 2018 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The annual Critical Materials Council (CMC) Seminar held October 29-30, 2018, in Ningbo, China in partnership with the IC Materials and Components Technology Innovation Alliance (ICMtia) of China was a great success, with over 350 people representing 23 fabs and over 100 materials suppliers in attendance. The photo shows ICMtia General Secretary Ingrid Shi (left) and TECHCET/CMC President and CEO Lita Shon-Roy (right) at the start of this historic global event. China is both a buyer and a supplier of critical materials for semiconductor fabrication.

Many of the presentations concerned the status of China's domestic supply-chain in reaching global standards to support IC HVM. "The majority of materials for leading-edge fabs are still coming from overseas," observed Shon-Roy. "While there is effort to cultivate local suppliers. KFMI has been delivering metal sputtering targets since 2005, and is successfully supplying leading-edge memory fabs."

CMC Members attending the event were able to take a tour of CMC Associate Member KFMI's facilities in a suburb of Ningbo, China. KFMI has a broad portfolio of products and has been collaborating with Cabot Microelecronics to supply CMP pads. The tour of the KFMI facility showed capability to do grooving and other CMP pad finishing on-site. "This is an excellent strategy for a newer company to adopt," commented Shon-Roy, "Importing refined base material from proven overseas sources and then doing final finishing locally."

Zing Semiconductor, a CMC Associate Member, is focused on 300mm manufacturing in the NSIG (National Silicon Industry Group) family. Zing installed equipment in 2017, and in 2018 passed prime wafer qualification with several customers leading to producing tens of thousands of wafers per month (wpm). Zing finished installation of the first phase of 100k wpm capacity, and started the receipt and installation of equipment for the next phase of 200k wpm capacity which is anticipated to be consumed during 2019. Zing has also been confirmed to be the sole Nationally Sponsored Company for next generation process development, which will allow it to spend over 1B RMB over the next several years to ramp capacity to a target of 1M wpm.

ON Semiconductor's strategic sourcing manager Carlos Padilla Flores provided a keynote presentation on "International Supply-Chain Management Challenges" - his ongoing challenge is to find alternate local sources to supply many global fabs running a wide variety of products types. One primary challenge is managing the change-requests from qualified suppliers, when disruptions to raw-materials sources happen as shown in The Figure (see thumbnail). Chemicals are the most complex commodities to control in a semiconductor HVM line, subject to all manner of change requests from suppliers. Across all commodity materials categories, the packaging (indicated by the teal color) is the most requested change which must be managed so far this year. Filter suppliers are working to get replacement parts qualified, while CMP pad suppliers are working with new raw material sources.

Face-to-face meetings between CMC Fab Members and materials suppliers were given high marks, with excellent opportunities for benchmarking of best practices and learning about supplier compentencies. Important discussions were held regarding recent trade and tariff issues between the U.S. and China, with ripple-effects felt in other countries resulting in a need to mitigate global supply-chain disruptions.

The spring CMC event is scheduled for April 23-26, 2019, in Malta & Saratoga, New York. GlobalFoundries will host the private face-to-face meetings and session with suppliers (April 23-24). The public CMC Conference will follow (April 25-26), featuring a keynote presentation from GlobalFoundries' Deputy CTO and VP of Worldwide R&D Dr. John Pellerin. For more information please email Email Contact or go to https://cmcfabs.org/cmc-events.

SOURCE Critical Materials Council