Semiconductor Vacuum Equipment Companies Finally Dipping Their Toes into Wet Processing?

Implications: The prospect of Lam purchasing SEZ, a successful wet process equipment vendor, places all of the wet process equipment manufacturers on the watch list. Lam has had its Synergy wet cleaning product line for some time now, but it did not seem to attract the attention of their main competitors because the notion of Lam having wet process equipment came in on the coattails of their CMP equipment and OnTrak wafer cleaners. Likewise, Applied Materials has had post-CMP cleaner modules along with their CMP equipment. Novellus got into the wet process business when they bought their copper electrodeposition business. Yet none of these product lines seemed to draw any attention to the general wafer cleaning products, which were viewed as low-tech and not strategically important, since all dry wafer processing was always just around the corner. The prospect of Lam buying SEZ, and inspiring a competitive bid from AMAT, could trigger a free-for-all for wet equipment vendor acquisitions.

Analysis: Vacuum semiconductor equipment companies and wet chemistry companies have had very little in common over the past forty years. Wet processing has more often than not been viewed among the non-value-add process steps, the necessary evils that removed residues and potential defects, or prepared the surface for the next critical thin film deposition step. The scale-up of 300mm wafers has made single wafer wet processing competitive, even necessary, for cleaning, etching, and surface preparation steps. The folks at SEZ have done a nice job exploiting the strengths of their spin processor to establish a foothold, and then expanding their process repertoire to the position of strength they now enjoy for copper damascene processing, particularly in Taiwan. They have attracted Lam's serious attention, even though Lam has had its own internal wet cleaning development program in place for several years, with some nice patents to their credit. It remains to be seen whether the SEZ toolset will replace Lam's own products, or will complement them. In any case, we can anticipate that this equipment M&A activity will be followed by some market positioning to secure access to the chemical compositions needed to make the processes effective. There is a limited lifetime left on making sub-100nm processes work with generic bulk chemicals. The next phoenix rising will be proprietary chemical formulations for these equipment platforms. And the core competence for developing those formulations is far more foreign to the vacuum equipment makers than the wet process equipment competence ever was.