Offtopic: Austria for Canoes and Mask Writing

It's Labor Day on Monday here in the US, a day that traditionally marks the end of summer. Although if you live in California, and not in the mountains, we pretty much have summer all year round. But isn't today Thursday? Indeed it is. Friday is a global recharge day and Cadence gets a day off all over the world. The nice thing about a global holiday like that is that many of the people who might send you email from other parts of the world are off too. On Monday, we are off in the US but not elsewhere, so on Tuesday my email will be full of messages from Europe, India, and China that built up while I was barbequing or whatever the day before.

As usual, the day before a break, I go offtopic. Today I'm going to write about Austria, which raises the obvious question, "Why Austria?" Or, given the average American's knowledge of geography, "Where is Austria?" (see the map below for the answer to that one).

Recently, I happened to read Dylan Patel's piece Austria’s Silent Monopolies On Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing – EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication. I'll come back to that at the end of this post, so today's offtopic post will be a lot less offtopic than normal.

My Visits to Austria

After I graduated with my undergraduate degree from Cambridge and before I started on my PhD at Edinburgh, I had a year off. Most of that time I was living and working in Cambridge, but during the summer I worked in France for a company that organized activity holidays in France. I lived and worked in the Ardèche where we took people, mostly teenagers from Britain, on a three day canoeing trip down the Ardèche river from Vallon-Pont-d'Arc to Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche. I was the caving (spelunking) instructor. The Ardèche gorge is made out of limestone so there are quite a few caves. One of the canoe instructors was Angus. His name was actually Cameron, but like all the other instructors he ended up with a nickname and nobody's real name got used. Cameron/Angus had been the president of the EUCC, the Edinburgh University Canoe Club, and he suggested that I should join it when I got to Edinburgh. So I did. Eventually, I too would become president of the EUCC.

It may sound surprising to say it, but Scotland doesn't have enough water for good canoeing/kayaking. It rains on a lot of days but not much in total, and mostly in winter. If you want really good water, you have to go to somewhere where a lot of snow accumulates during the winter and then melts during the summer. Somewhere like...Austria.

Every summer, the EUCC would take one of the university minbuses and a big canoe trailer and go to Austria. Actually, we would drive non-stop to Augsburg. I say "non-stop" but this was before the channel tunnel had been built and the fastest and cheapest way to cross the channel was on huge hovercraft. Yes, you could fit a thirty-foot long vehicle. Augsburg is where Germany built an artificial slalom course for the 1972 Olympics. It is still used for events, but on days when it is not, it is free for anyone to use, and so we did, once on the way to Austria and, usually, once on the way back.

In Austria, the rivers rise during the day as the sun melts the snow. On one of the trips, one of my friends discovered the hard way having left his shoes on a rock some way above the water level—you can guess the rest, the water came up and his shoes were gone. Canoeing in Austria was very different from Scotland. Only once had I canoed on really big water, when the people running the Cruachan pumped storage system (see my post How Many Journalists per Square Acre? for more about that) were worried that the lower storage area at the end of Loch Awe would get to the spillway, so instead they opened the gates wide.

When you are in a kayak—in Britain we don't really distinguish and call everything a canoe—your head is only about three feet above the surface of the water. So once the waves get to, say, six feet high, then most of the time you can't see much. There is a wall of water in front of you. You have to look around when you are on the top of the crest of one wave, to see what is coming up, then paddle blindly as you drop into the trough between waves. In Austria, on the Inn, the big standing waves could reach 12-15 feet, so you really only get brief glimpses of what is ahead. If there is a rock, you'd need to paddle left or right hard to avoid it.

So I went to Austria two or three summers during my PhD. I was much in demand, since in Europe you have to be over 21 to drive a minibus compared to 17 or 18 to drive a normal car. So most undergraduates were too young to drive it. We would typically only have a couple of drivers. I ended up doing a lot of the driving. So I've driven quite a bit in obscure corners of Austria that a normal tourist never visits.

I didn't go to the capital Vienna until I worked for VaST Systems Technology. The canoeing rivers are all in the thin part at the West of Austria, and Vienna is so far East it is barely in the country. I consider Vienna to be the star of several movies. Most notably, of course, The Third Man but also Before Sunrise. By the way, most of the script for Before Sunrise was written or improvised by Julie Delphy and Ethan Hawke, the two main actors, and they were apparently a bit upset that it was uncredited. And if the first film you thought of was The Sound of Music, you are in the right country, Austria, but the wrong city, Salzburg.

The reason I had to go to Vienna while working for VaST was that some part of the FlexRay consortium was based there. FlexRay was a standard communication protocol that was being developed for automotive. In the end, it was largely made obsolete by automotive Ethernet (for more on that see my posts Ethernet: Coming Soon to a Car Near You and  Automotive Ethernet). We drove to Vienna and back from Munich in one day, but I was there for long enough to eat Wienerschnitzel in Vienna (Wien is Vienna in German). And if you live in America you might think Wienerschnitzel has something to do with hot dogs, but if you want to associate a European city with hot dogs that would have to be Frankfurt, in Germany not Austria, and the home of the Frankfurter.

EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication

If you asked me for a connection to Austria for the semiconductor industry, I would say Austria Mikro Systeme (AMS). It started in 1981 with a 100mm fab (4"). Although AMS, now under the name "ams OSRAM", is a successful company, it is not what Dylan Patel calls a "silent monopoly" in his piece that I linked to at the start of this post.

Everyone knows that the most advanced processes depend on EUV, and that there is only one supplier of EUV scanners and that is ASML in the Netherlands. It is anything but silent. But as Dylan says:

Those familiar with the semiconductor industry could easily rattle off another dozen companies just as critical to the global semiconductor supply chain. This list would include well-known firms such as Samsung, Intel, Cadence, Synopsys, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Tokyo Electron, Applied Materials, and Lam Research.

Hey, at least we made the cut.

But the silent monopolies are companies that have a choke-hold on some aspect of semiconductor manufacturing, but that hardly anybody has ever heard of. The two that Dylan writes about are EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication:

Despite this lack of notoriety, Austria’s EV Group and IMS Nanofabrication are quietly critical for all advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Every advanced logic, DRAM, NAND, and image sensor fabrication company relies on products from these two firms. Through these two firms, Austria’s market share is 82% in wafer bonding and over 95% of production multibeam mask writers.

IMS Nanofabrication is actually part of Intel these days:

Eventually, Intel even acquired the firm as they released the first commercial multi-beam mask writer in 2016. This product and its derivatives are required for all process nodes beyond 7nm.

EV Group is private. I admit I'd never heard of them:

They are a supplier of semiconductor manufacturing equipment for mask alignment, nanoimprint lithography, photoresist racks, wafer cleaning, and inspection and metrology. While they have varying success in these markets, the market that EV Group outright dominates is wafer bonding. They have 82% market share in this type of tool, with the next closest player, Tokyo Electron, only having 17% market share.

I wouldn't want to be #3 in that market!

Most CMOS Image Sensors (CIS) use EV Group's technology, which means that the camera your smartphone almost certainly depends on them. There's a bit of Austria in your pocket.

Dylan wraps out by pointing out that the semiconductor supply chain could not operate without many countries, not just the obvious ones like US, Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, and more. But less obvious ones like, well, Austria:

we find it humorous that Austria could singlehandedly bring the semiconductor supply chain for NAND, DRAM, logic, and CMOS image sensors to its knees if they wanted to.

 NAND, DRAM, logic, CIS...these are a few of my favorite things!  

Have a Great Labor Day

Have a Great Labor Day if you are in the US. And a great recharge day if you work for Cadence. Otherwise...sorry...it's just a normal weekend for you.

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