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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.
Why don't they skip to 10 foot wafers?
Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to put facilities that mass produce chips in countries where labor is cheap? Most Intel chips I've seen are marked "Made in Malaysia" or "Made in the Philippines."
300 mm refers to the size of the wafer. One wafer contains lots of chips.
Be wary of any facts that confirm your opinion.
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?
Wheeeee
It's the size of the wafer, the round silicon thing with *many* chips on it.
See this link (to Intel, inappropriately) for more info.
Thank you AMD for laying the foundation of the Saxony (Silicon) Valley together with Infineon. Thank you for recognizing the talent, education, pracmatism and working power of the patient and friendly Saxony people. Your payback is visible as you are now nearly your break even. Thank for enjoying our great land and cultural as well as industrial heritage.
May also come the great R&D Transmeta, Big Blue, Samsung and Motorola here. You will get our working power and you will fall love too.
300mm is the diameter of the silicon wafer.
A large number of dies are constructed on the circular wafer, tested and the wafer is then cut up with a diamond saw. At this point the dies that failed the tests are binned (there certainly used to be a very high failure rate - not sure how high it is these days though).
AMD makes their CPUs as "flip-chips" these days, thich means that the die is bonded directly onto a PCB, instead of embedding it in ceramic or plastic.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Alright - I know my Athlon is bigger than a millimeter squared, but I paid way less than $10,000 for it...
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Please, for god sakes, do not talk out of your ass. How does this shit get modded up? Just baffles the mind.
I work in the industry. Your numbers and your assumptions are way off. Fist off, a 200mm polished non-epitaxial silicon wafer is going to cost about $60-75 depending on the specific processing you want done to it. A 300mm wafer isn't a whole lot more. A big piece of the cost of a wafer is the processing, labor, and subsidization of investment capital for the huge plants required to manufacture wafers. The silicon itself isn't terribly expensive. 300mm wafers do not cost an arm and a leg. They are the most cost effective way to produce chips right now and 300mm is the market standard. AMD has been using 200mm wafers in the past but with the larger die size of their newer chips, 200mm is biting into their profits. The problem is silicon wafers are round and CPU dies are square. All of the silicon around the edges is wasted where a whole core won't fit. 300mm makes this wasted silicon a much smaller percentage of the total wafer's surface area.
Wrong assumption two: 300mm will be here for a while. There are still a lot of companies using 200mm wafers. I know this because I personally make 200mm wafers, and market forecasts has us producing a shit load of 8" wafers for THE NEXT TWO YEARS. 300mm wafer demand is growing, and will continue to grow for quite some time as companies make the transition. I would expect 300mm to be standard until at least '07 or '08. I heard someone talking a while ago about 350mm wafers, but I have a strong suspicion this person was, like you, also talking out their ass. To my knowledge, 300mm is the largest wafer being produced now or in the near future.
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The feature size is independant of the fab tooling. AMD will implement the smallest affordable feature size at the time the fab comes on line and most likely will be running two feature sizes. Depending on who is making their chips in two years (probably IBM) they will most likely use the same masks and try to get matching silicon up to production levels.
The fab is mostly just the facility (shake proof bldg, class 1, 10, 100, etc, wafer handling). What goes into the fab is the latest equiptment. That equipment will support multiple generations of lithography.
why don't they make square wafers then? I'm seriously not being a troll, I assume that the wafer isn't being rolled around or spun, at least after being manufactured.. so why not use a square wafer, or recycle the silicon that's wasted?
I'll admit I know nothing of the production of silicon wafers, but it doesn't seem like it'd be harder to get square ones than round ones, or that it'd be impossible to make round ones, chop off the edges to make it square, ship that to AMD, and then melt the edges down in to another wafer.
And hence, I ask.
Due to the nature in which silicon crystals are grown, they will always come out round. A seed of perfectly aligned silicon is dipped into a crucible of molten silicon. Both are counter-rotated and the seed is slowly pulled from the melt, thus producing a round crystal.
I have a feeling that making a square wafer out of a round crystal is possible, but it probably isn't cost effective compared to the current ID saw method.
I worked in the grower industry for a few years but not in a fab. Someone closer to the industry please correct me if I am wrong, but doesn't the waster silicon go back to the supplier for re-purification?
Wafers are produced as slices from long, round silicium blocks. They have this form because that's the way they come out of the zone heating ovens used to purify the silicium and melt out all the atoms you don't want on the chip. Non silicium atoms cause defects in the crystalline structure because of different size and number of electrons in the shell.
;)
That's one of the issues with 300mm wafers (where 300mm refers to about one foot in diameter): The silicium blocks are wider in diameter, thus needing larger zone heating ovens, thus more energy evenly distributed over the whole zone. If the energy isn't exact the right one in the melting zone, the wrong atoms get out.
The purified silicium blocks then get sawed into thin slices. Larger slices are more prone to breaking during the handling, another issue to overcome while going to larger wafer sizes. They have larger surfaces which could be scratched or damaged.
On the other hand: Once you have the whole process running, you get more chips from the same area
Nobody opposes freedom for Iraqis. Some people, however, think that maybe we should have kept on with the diplomacy a bit longer before sending in troops. Who is right? I don't know. At the very least, it's fairly expensive international-relations suicide to go invading stuff on your own without the help of the UN. But suggesting that because they do not advocate war, Germany opposes freedom for Iraqis is ridiculous.
See my earlier post. US companies are not for the most part moving FABs to Asia. Mostly packaging and final test. I go through the reasons for it, but it basically boils down to packaged processors are about 10x as bulky as the die on a wafer. Therefore, it takes about 10x the labor just to move them to and from the package line or test equipment.
they cant produce square wafers.
This kind of cleaning works that way:
you have a silicion rod and move is SLOWLY through a heating device that heats it up enough to let non-silicon atoms migrate.
The end that leaves the heated area slowly cools, and (if all goes right) silicon atoms create a monocrystal. The wrong atoms stay in the heated area and wander to the end which is cut off.
in reallity, you often need many passes...
now, if you would use a square rod, the corners are HIGHLY sensitive and very likely to cause defects in the crystal...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?