Strategic Materials Conference

SEMI’s Strategic Materials Conference is coming up fast, on September 30th and October 1st next week at the Biltmore in Santa Clara. This year’s theme, Materials Matter—Enabling the Future of IC Fabrication and Packaging, will take a broad look at what is driving the demand for new materials, and how material suppliers are being impacted by the value chain they serve.

The semiconductor industry has reached a major inflection point: no longer is device scaling and performance driven solely by reductions in feature size. Higher device performance using less power requires the incorporation of many new materials to maintain the industry’s cadence. These material needs to span across the spectrum from fabricating 3D transistor structures, to accelerating interconnect speeds, to packaging the devices in the appropriate form factors for use in phones, tablets and devices encompassing the internet of things. SMC will discuss market opportunities and examine how to win in this “Age of Materials”.

The two keynote speakers are from the biggest IDM and the biggest fabless semiconductor company: Intel and Qualcomm. Matt Nowak of Qualcomm gives the opening keynote on Materials Innovation for the Digital 6th Sense Era. On Wednesday morning, the keynote is delivered by Tim Hendry of Intel on Strategies and New Models for Creating an Affordable Material Supply Chain.

New this year are:

• Device Makers Session: Materials Challenges for Emerging Technology and Devices
• Market Trends Session: Economic/Material Trends/Emerging Technology Trends

There are also sessions (with multiple presentations) on Supply Change Challenges, Advanced Memories, Advanced Packaging/TSVs and “beyond 10nm”, the Material Manufacturers Perspective.

The complete agenda for the conference is here. The conference is almost sold out so online registration has been closed. Call Lin Tso at 408 943-7920 for availability if you want to go.

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