Posting on behalf of Kevin Teo, Product and Strategic Management at BASF:
PPG's exit from the CMP pad market seems to have generated interesting discussions in the CMP circle. PPG was on the verge of success, having several customers, surmounting the learning curve, and making inroads into diversification of the pad supplier base.
To some, it is a foreboding message of futility in trying to break open this segment, despite great their respect for a good pad and technology. Others remain hopeful and supportive of a very credible pad and anticipated that it can be revived. Yet others think that it opens more opportunities for more startups. It'd be great to hear opinions from the CMP network!
I was sad to see PPG exit the pad business. I think they had a good product for ILD and STI applications. On the other hand, as far as I could tell, their technology was a 'ME TOO' offering going against RHEM's IC family of pads. As such, it would have only competed in price and not necessarily in performance.
Having said that, I think the vacuum that their exit created will be filled pretty quickly by CMC's D100 pads as well as pads made by other up-and-coming manufacturers such as NexPlanar in the US and several others in Japan and Korea.
I strongly believe that 2009 and 2010 will be the years during which the previous exercises in futility will cease and we will finally enjoy adopting hard as well as soft pads in HVM with improved cost and performance metrics.
I am not worried.
Another thing has come to my mind which I would like to share with you and solicit some feedback:
I think that for a major IC maker to qualify a new pad supplier for an existing or new technology node, they would not only look at the new supplier's product of interest (say a hard PU pad), but they would also like to see that the supplier has a viable portfolio (or a feasible roadmap with several key deliverable already completed) of other types of pads such as a soft pad for barrier polish. Trying to qualify a new supplier that has a portfolio of pads (or one class of pads with highly tunable bulk or surface mechanical properties) helps sell that supplier internally since it somehow demonstrates that the supplier will be around for a while and will be able to horizontally address the IC makers other CMP pad needs.
I am not sure whether PPG was an all-around supplier with a rich (or reasonably varied) CMP pad portfolio, or whether they had positioned themselves as an ILD/STI hard pad competitor to RHEM.
Any inputs?
I think that PPG had a good "hard" pad replacement for IC pads and also some good concepts for "semi-hard" pads (open cell). It is possible that they went through a tough learning curve, that is often unexpected if the company is not a key CMP supplier, to start with. If the shakeout of strategies, tactics and derivation of a focused R & D and marketing path takes too long then it may become unsustainable in the eyes of a large parent company. The hard thing to do as a newcomer (even a large company) is to prove that one has a very robust and credible basic product range, while stretching to accomodate every tweak for diverse product range. This is definitely confounded by the fact that you need a reference customer(s) to stabilize a core product range for more quals, and then getting sufficient resources and focus to handle additional processing windows. The good thing, I perceive, is that the survivors should be getting stronger and, hopefully, consolidating experiences and expertise smarter for the next round of market penetration efforts. Hope to hear from more parties - what do the customers think?