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Next-Generation Chip Fabs
PaulBu writes "As reported in EE Times, a new IBM $2.5B fab will be the first one to 'produce chips using all three of the sophisticated technologies on the industry's bleeding edge: low-k dielectrics, copper interconnect and silicon-on-insulator based transistors' on 300mm wafers. And it runs entirely on Linux! Quote from the article: 'The state of automation in Building 323 is such that 20,000 sensors are used to track wafer lots in front-opening unified pods that are transported from one tool to the next on rails using linear induction motors. The setup resembles an intricate monorail system tuned to millimeter-precision specs. A central control system monitors all stations and tracks wafer lots via 802.11 wireless communications.'"
"An internally developed master software system called SiView controls all manufacturing operations. An IBM spokesperson said the manufacturing execution system is being licensed to others for fab control.
As for the intended output of Building 323, Bijan Davari, vice president for technology and emerging products, said the company has "spent $500 million on process development alone in order to maintain our technology leadership, and we are experiencing a significant recovery via intellectual-property licensing and alliances. Our value proposition is that we are one to two years ahead of the best of the best."
Um, just millimeter? You'd think where chips have components measured in nanometers, that you'd need just a bit more than millimeter precision. Oops, that transistor's off a bit again! i wonder why? :P
They're referring to the system that shuttles containers of wafers around the fab, moving them from machine to machine. Robots run around on rails, dropping down to pick up a sealed container of wafers and whisk it away to the next stage in the manufacturing process.
Once a wafer is loaded into a stepper for printing, rest assured that it is aligned very precisely.
Good thing they just laid off 1000 people at their Essex Junction, VT fab.
- The Sigless Wonder
Uh... do you have any idea how much fabs cost? Six years ago a state-of-the-art fab, which was designed to manufacture nothing smaller than 0.15 micron transistors (and 0.25 was top notch at the time) cost nearly $1.5B.
Once in full production the fab paid for itself in under 9 months. Amazing what happens when fabbing lots (a lot is 12 or 24 wafers, at least where I worked) that have a street value of $250,000.
Chip costs won't rise. They'll continue to fall, just as they always have. Building a fab is indeed a large investment, but if you have the money to invest then it's one that'll pay for itself in a very short amount of time.
Frankly, $2.5B for a 65 nm (aka 0.065 micron) fab is a good value. Sure, if they're starting off with 150 nm or 130 nm equipment they'll have to replace nearly everything to go down to 90 or 65 nm, but that's probably less than a billion per cycle. Equipment is no big deal -- the building itself is a huge deal. Getting all the tolerances tight enough for 65 nm work costs a LOT of money.
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-- The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'.
i'm assuming you've never worked in manufacturing, but the machines used in most plants almost never run completely unattended. much of the time they have an operator who's job is to watch over the machine to make sure it's operating. in addition they (or someone else) is almost always responsible for taking a sample of the product after the machine has done it's duty and running it through various tests to ensure certain conditions on the parts they are creating. this helps to guarantee both that if a machine is not functioning normally, it's caught as soon as possible and second that those parts that were manufactured while the machine was misbehaving don't get sent on for further processing.
any manufacturing company worth their salt (read in business) has these measures in place, IBM being one of these.
(and yes, i work for IBM, but no longer on the manufacturing side)
As others have pointed out, the system is for moving wafers, not loading them into the machines. This is nothing new -- I worked at Texas Instruments several years ago and they had a rail system moving lots around the fabs, keyed to barcode scanners and a Unix backend (we used Solaris on oodles of Sparc 5's).
Honestly, it's not clear from the article if the rail system does end-to-end transport, or if it's just a lot shuttle. At TI it was just a shuttle - you'd ask for the next lot to be processed for a particular machine and the system would retrieve the lot and move the tray to you. A technician would pick the basket up off the rail and then use vacuum wands to move the wafers into the loading mechanism for the machine. Once processing was done, vacuum wand the wafers back into the basket and place it back on the track.
This process is error prone -- TI would only hire technicians with at least a high school diploma, but it's still human intensive and distractions can (and did) cause problems. Grab the wafer by the wrong side? Toast. Vacuum seal break while moving the wafer? Shatter. Drop the basket? Many shatters. Accidentilly forget which wafers have been processed already (many of the machines could only load 5 or 10 wafers, and a lot was 24 wafers)? Bad things happen when you double-dope or double-etch wafers.
If IBM's new automation system is end-to-end, meaning that the rail system somehow automatically loads and unloads the wafers to/from machines then that's a real advancement. It would allow you to eliminate 80% of the humans from inside the fab, and humans are one of the primary causes of particles. When you start talking about 65 nm processes, you have to seriously consider eliminating humans as much as possible from the environment. Or at least having them wear self-contained suits -- hair, skin, and clothing all shed humongous particles at a frightening rate (to a silicon wafer that is). And don't even think about being a smoker.
I've worked in motion control, although nothing that big, and 1 GHz processors are overkill for that application. Heck, we got decent results with 486-50s.
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The automation system is tool-to-tool movement of wafers and the goal is indeed to try to eliminate the need for almost all of the human operators.
All of the 300mm manufacturing equipment is linked into a fabwide automation network through a series of standards so that each individual wafer in the fab is tracked through each of 400 processing steps. At any moment the system knows exactly where every wafer is, what processes it is gone through so far, and where it needs to go next. Then a master scheduling program acts to efficently move the wafers to the next available tool. The goal is to improve the cycle time of moving the wafers through the fab as well as reducing labor costs. It's a pretty slick system and looks damn cool. It's also frightening when you realize that a single cassette of 25 wafers near the end of line is worth well over $1 million and they are speeding around overhead.
Also, although IBM is leading in automation implementation right now slmost all of the other 300mm fabs worldwide are putting in similar systems.
Chip costs won't rise. They'll continue to fall, just as they always have. Building a fab is indeed a large investment, but if you have the money to invest then it's one that'll pay for itself in a very short amount of time.
Uh, this assumes you have good products in high demand and can keep the fab running continuously at or near full capacity. A fab running below half capacity can bleed red ink pretty fast! Unfortunately, there's quite a bit of overcapacity in the semiconductor industry at the moment (mostly due to rapid expansion by foundries in Taiwan and elsewhere in Asia). This is one reason why semiconductor stocks have been in the toilet for the last year or so. IBM's Fab will only make this worse. Although IBM's advanced processing technology definitely gives them an advantage, so it may be their competitors rather than IBM that feels the pinch.
Equipment is no big deal -- the building itself is a huge deal. Getting all the tolerances tight enough for 65 nm work costs a LOT of money.
Think again, equipment prices are HUGE, especially when you're talking state of the art 300mm tools! They account for the greater portion of that $2.5B price tag. Lithography tools alone run $15-25M each and a big production fab like this probably has 20-30, so you're already at $0.5B with just one step of the process. Now add in Ion implanters, Plasma etch systems, CVD equipment, diffusion furnaces, Sputtering systems, chemical mechanical polish tools, electroplating equipment, and wet clean hoods, not to mention all the analytical equipment (SEMs, Elipsometers, particle counters, Quantox systems, CV plotters etc...) needed to ensure everything is functioning properly.
side note: I work at the 200mm fab across the street.
.1 "cleanroom". That is why the tools are so expensive. As for the fab paying for itself, it's highly unlikely that 323 will be able to generate enough revenue this year to offset depreciation. $2.5B is what IBM chipped in(no pun intended). Toshiba, Sony, and Siemens are our 'partners' in this venture.
Actually, the equipment is a big deal, the building was the small thing. The building has been here for over 15 years and its been empty for at least 5.
As for "Getting all the tolerances tight enough for 65nm work costs a LOT of money." The fab is actually only a class 100 cleanroom. Each tool is a micro-environment with its own air handlers creating a class