Another day, I was caught myself thinking about innovation … what exactly is considered innovation?
So, for more obvious it seems I decided to go for search what is innovation… what I found in general lines was that “innovation can refer to something new, such as an invention, or the practice of developing and introducing new things.”
That linked me to another term ‘creativity’. But exactly what creativity means?
What I found for this was that creativity is “the ability to make or otherwise bring into existence something new, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic object or form.”
By looking both meanings we can easily understand that innovation walks together with creativity and vice-versa.
Then I started thinking about my experience and to question myself:
“What have we done? What we were able to achieve?”
I know for sure that we were creative, once it was a question of survival of the company at that moment.
It´s not something easy to know when you are not worried about it. If you have one master goal to reach in your activity you can achieve more than one thing at the same time and even more as the years goes by.
So, here I saw myself proud to be able to understand how many things we´ve done.
The thing is …the more I study and see the difficulties in the semiconductor industry, more I can understand there are many solutions not yet published, and there is a lot of space for innovation and creativity.
There are few things I know we innovated:
- After boron diffusion we have a boron skin that is hard to be removed and there are some ways to do it without being published up to now.
- The metallization can be obtained through evaporation, electron bean, sputtering, electrolytically or electroless. The nickel electroless bath stability is hard to get, and we reached a solution that we could stabilize it.
- There are several etching solutions used in the semiconductor industry, from dry etch to wet etch where the etching control relies on different parameters. The association of those parameters is not a simple task. For us wet etch played an important role, as we needed high orientated and controlled corrosion rates. Took from us a lot of years to develop and control it, but we managed to do it, reaching better results and reproducibility from batch to batch.
- Thermal coefficient of expansion is a very important matter in semiconductor, and it opens the possibility to use new and cheaper materials giving better results and reducing production costs.
- Diffusion is a process used in all the semiconductor industry and we can find unusual solutions that gave better junctions characteristics with less undesirable effects.
- Packaging with better properties or at least the same properties but lowering costs.
The list of innovations is a long one and we found new process or new materials to be used in our production that could make us competitive.
Think about frontend, backend, applications … the world here is huge, and the field is vast for new possibilities.
I do believe we have a few steps to be able to find unknown solutions for difficulties. The 5 main steps are as bellow:
- Keep an open mind, there is no possibility that can be discharged without even been questioned.
- Knowledge, search for knowledge in a thousand different ways
- Integration, united the other 2 previous steps
- Resilience with Intelligence: try, and try and try again, quitting is not an option
- Interpretation: observe and understand.
We´ve been through those steps multiple times, and that was what gave us a lot of innovation.
I grew up with innovation, what make me love it and understand that we can ever be creative! So, what you think?? Let´s be creative??
Semiconductor Experience Sharing 