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New IBM Plant Will Mass Produce .1 Micron Chips
Ruger writes "AP News is carrying this story about IBM opening a new plant in upstate New York. What's most interesting about the story is that IBM will be producing .1 Micron Chips rather than the usual .25 or .18 produced by Intel and other chip makers, or .13 Micron chips they currently make for their PowerPC chips."
'Bout time IBM got back into upstate NY.
I remember when I was just leaving the area, the last of the local plants finally scaled back to just a matinance group, the whole area died. IBM was the heart and soul of quite a few towns in New York, and they didn't do very well when it left.
-GiH
If this is true, it looks like Moore's Law could have a few years left in it, after all. In a few years, we may end up living in the future!
Imagine a computer small enough to fit in your pocket. Imagine a computer in your car. Imagine a computer in your glasses! It sounds like science fiction, but it looks like IBM is actually seizing the bull by the horns and making it a reality.
It's also interesting that they are doing this in New York. I thought all chip manufacturing was done overseas, where labor is cheaper. Perhaps IBM is getting some sort of government subsidy for creating American jobs. Or maybe New York has a good supply of chipmakers already, so they can find more skilled workers.
Whatever the reason, it's good to see innovation marching along. This is the kind of activity that will get us out of the current recession. Good luck, IBM!
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Isn't the northwood P4 produced at .13 micron? And the AMD Throughbred is also at .13? The header says that other chip manufacturers produce chips at .25 or .18 when this simply isn't true.
IBM does not make G4s. They don't have a license for Altivec. They already make quite speedy G3s, but you don't see them in consumer products that are marketed based on Mhz.
For somebody from Long Island, everything north of the Bronx is upstate.
What are the current guesses on how much smaller we can get?
:-)
Usually, the current guesses are about twice smaller than current technilogy
Seriously, there are two (in fact more) limits: there's the smallest transistor possible that works correctly and there's the smallest features size we can mass-produce with reasonnable (well, it's already unreasonnable...) cost.
Right now, the most limiting factor is the second. The visible light is already much too big (wavelength) for lithography so they're using (AFAIK) ultra-violet, but one of the problems is that the smaller the wavelength, the harder it is to find a transparent material at that wavelength (glass doesn't work past a certain wavelength).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
The real demand for using the smaller feature size is in two areas--low power and high performance. In the low-power market, you have all sorts of consumer electronics like cell phones. In the high performance, you're talking CPUs. Personally, I would love to see them build PowerPC chips.
From the article, it sounds like they'll be operating the plan under contract from other companies, so it will most likely be making chipsets for pagers and cell phones.
Of course, the market can be expected to change significantly between now and when the plant is actually ready to build chips.
Hah, competitors hardly need to "catch up." Seimconductor companies almost never want to be the first to build a fab supporting the largest wafer size, unless your design a chip that no one is buying and have to dedicate 420+ mm2 per die just to get decent performance. ;) Being first sounds good on paper, but it also means you get to debug all of the new tools from vendors. If you thought beta software builds were costly, try running your expensive wafers though a $4M+ Endura from Applied Materials and having the robot shatter them. Not only have you lost your test vehicles, you wasted expensive chemicals and have to clean up the vacuum chamber. Not fun or cheap by any means.
The running joke in the biz is that every company wants to be in second place in the race.
AP Reporter: Wow! 0.1 microns! How small is that?
IBM marketroid: That's almost as small as some gas molecules. In fact, you could say these new chips are just VAPOR.
If you want to have more details about this fab, check out:
IBM's news
Yahoo Story
NY Times (free reg, blah)
Just for the record, I work at IBM in East Fishkill, NY (but not in Chip manufacturing.) I do NOT speak for IBM.
IBM has been in East Fishkill since the early 60s, manufacturing chips and packaging (MCMs, etc.) for mainframes. IBM employs over 10,000 people in Poughkeepsie (10 miles away) and East Fishkill. The "New" plant is a new chip fabrication line in an old building (building 323) that used to be used to make bipolar chips for mainframes. They have been working on this new plant for over two years, and it is already producing sample chips. Normal production is scheduled to begin in the fourth quarter (btw, the current production from this plant is 0.13 micron, but in the future, it will move to sub 0.1 micron processes.)
IBM is using this plant as a high-end foundry. In other words, customers will design high performance chips that will be manufactured here. They are already working with some high-volume customers (Nintendo, Sony, etc.) Customers will also include IBM chip designers (mostly IBM servers.)
Oh, and on the whole upstate, downstate issue: People who live in upstate New York consider us downstate. People who live in downstate New York consider us upstate.
And, as Gov. Pataki said yesterday, the Hudson Valley is much nicer than Silicon Valley. We have trees.
The executive summary of the 2001 edition predicts that in 2016 the drawn gate length for microprocessors will be 13 nanometers (0.013 microns).
Now that we're on the verge of 0.1 micron transistors it is time to dump the microns unit and start using nanometers. The tables in the "International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors" all use nanometers.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
Everything you say is true, until your final statement. If IBM is making next to nothing on their peecee, then why do they continue to sell them? Why have they branded/rebranded (Ambra anyone?) their pc lineup? They continue to sink major dollars into pushing them. Why do they do this, well they do it so they can have across the board solutions to push into their accounts. They realize that it's easier to get into a place if they can sell them top to bottom and then provide service. And in the end, it's the service that's the _real_ money maker (margins on the big iron isn't that great either, the competition in the market is very strong and _nobody_ pays retail on those things).
The pc isn't the ends to IBM (like it is to Dell/Gateway/etc), but it is a very critical part of the means. And in that fashion, they need Intel more than Intel needs them.