NEWS CHIPS
Taking off might have been the easy part for CITC The Chip Integration Technology Center (CITC) plane has taken off, but there are a lot more seats to fill. ‘Captain’ Barry Peet explains how he intends to do so. Paul van Gerven
T
he initial team has been assembled, the lab space is filling up with tools, experiments are being conducted and Fieldlab status has been awarded: the Chip Integration Technology Center (CITC) at the Novio Tech Campus in Nijmegen is up and running. There even was an opportunity to celebrate the occasion. On 5 March, four days before the Dutch people stopped shaking hands, a crowd of industry executives and government officials gathered to see the proverbial ribbon cut. The event must have felt like a bit of a personal victory for Barry Peet, who as managing director of the Business Cluster Semiconductors (now called Holland Semiconductors) put a lot of effort into getting the open-innovation center off the ground. After getting companies, governments and partner institutes on board, Peet now gets to head up CITC. A little over a week after the event, however, Peet is primarily interested in looking towards the future – he has to, he explains, because his mission is far from over. “I’m happy with our expeditious start, but I consider CITC still to be a startup. Over the next few years, it’s imperative that we attract additional customers, broaden our scope and, above all, prove we have something to contribute,” says the managing director.
World-class player
CITC focuses on the final stages of the chip manufacturing process, referred to as the back-end. Traditionally, this involves wrapping freshly baked chips with a protective wrapper while also taking care of the electrical connections to the outside world. Though a crucial part of making a functional chip, these processes have lived a life in 12
2
the shadows for a long time. Cutting-edge lithography or the black arts of material composition and deposition – such frontend issues catch the imagination.
Semicon hotspot Nijmegen
“Nijmegen is evolving more and more into a substantial health and high tech hotspot. It’s one of the places to be as a semiconductor company. The open technological innovation center CITC is, therefore, a welcome and valuable addition to the city and will amongst others be working on technological innovations that contribute to worldwide connectivity and health,” explains Rikus Wolbers, program manager of Briskr, the consortium of organizations that supports health and high-tech companies in the Nijmegen region.
Over the past decade, however, the interest in – and glamour of – packaging has been growing rapidly, for a variety of reasons. One of them is simply the advance of semiconductor technology in general. As elements within a chip kept shrinking and its functionality expanding, chipmakers ran out of room for the electrical connections. New packaging techniques were required to make them fit. Another reason is size: smartphone manufacturers want to keep making their products better but not bulkier and more power hungry. Naked chips are generally as small as they can get, so packaging has to step up. For example, multiple chips can be combined – or integrated – in a single package, thus reducing size, as well as overall power consumption. This isn’t just of interest to smartphone manufacturers; many applications stand to benefit from such advanced integration. The Internet of Things will never happen without it.
