AMD Breaks Ground on New Chip Facility

philthedrill writes "AMD announced that they have broken ground on Fab 36, which again will be located in Dresden, Germany. The 300 mm fab is expected to start volume production in 2006. There's more information at CBS MarketWatch." AMD will be moving from its current 200 mm wafer process, and looking to save money through the higher efficiency of the new process, as well as keep up with expected demand for their next generation processors. The MarketWatch article also contains some speculation about probable partners for AMD.

Comments

Re:300 mm? I hope that's wrong.

[heliocentric]

Yeah, I was impressed when we were making 6" wafers a few years ago and darn proud of it. I remember back when they were the size of a US quarter dollar.

I worked in final visual inspection on a 6" line and that was very dicy. You'd get someone failing too many parts, whole wafers in some cases due to what their eye saw as too much FLUC. Tricky balancing act since FLUC identification is more of an art than a science (metering thing is a science with acceptable ranges and such) in that we didn't want to ship things that would fail in the wild, but we didn't want to fail too many things and incrase costs (a wafer at the final end has had a lot of effort put into it).

Oh wait, I just re-read your post. Where you meaning sarcasim or did you not understand what they were talking about?