Behind the Closed Doors of AMD's Chip Production

rokali writes "Tom's Hardware is running an article on AMD's chipmaking procedure, plants, and future. Check out the pictures of Fab 36, their new plant slated to open in 2006, which will put of the next generation of 65nm chips. From the article: 'Currently, AMD's devices in Dresden are still produced on 200 mm wafers; the new APM 3.0 using 300 mm wafers won't be ramped up until Fab 36 opens. Production startup at the new facility is slated for the beginning of 2006, at which point the company will have invested an additional $2.5 billion.'"

Comments

So many shiny toys!

[Blapto]

It's all so shiny. In true geek fashion I got to the first glittery photo and can no longer scroll down.

Question

[elid]

Incentives from the German government and the EU have lured a number of high-tech firms to the Saxony region of Germany, many of which have formed alliances. AMD, Infineon and ZMD work particularly closely together.

Anyone know anything about this? What makes Dresden so interesting to AMD?

Re:Question

[Blapto]

The EU will give funding and tax breaks to large inward investment. Computer chip designing is a huge added value system (cheapish raw materials/chip) so it produces a large benefit for the EU. You'll find the same going on in most countries.

Re:Question

[BlacBaron]

Not sure how related one could consider this, but it might explain why they chose Dresden and not some other german city.

History

As a result I believe it was rebuilt to be a rather industrial place.

Re:Question

[homerj79]

If I recall correctly from the PR fluff AMD put out a few years ago when they announced Fab 30, its due to the highly skilled workforce because of the Technische Universität Dresden (Dresden University of Technology).

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes Dresden so interesting to AMD?

They both have problems coping with heat.

Re:Question

[Zocalo]

Simple logistics; just as many tech companies congregated in Silicon Valley, a similar situation exists in Dresden. Going from chip design to the actual fabrication requires a considerable amount of support infrastructure much of which is done by external companies. For more complex devices it will typically take a few months at least from finalising the design to the first chips actually rolling out of the fab.

I know for a fact that not even Intel does everything in house, so it's highly unlikely that AMD does. Essentially there are just far too many different types of highly complex technologies and processes involved for one company to do it all. Having as much of that infrastructure located in the same general vicinity can save a lot of time, money and aggravation. Which is why we have manufacturing sites in both Silicon Valley and Dresden, amongst others...

Re:Question

[pipingguy]

And now, Germany is quite popelicious, too.

Surely I am going to hell for that statement.

Re:Question

[Bender_]

What makes Dresden so interesting to AMD?

Dresden was one of the centers of GDR microelectronics. The GDR was the technolocial leader in microelectronics of the entire east block and the gourvernment poured billions into it. However, COCOM succeeded in keeping them technologically way behing the western countries. Nevertheless, Dresden was the birthplace of Honeckers infamous 1 mbit (scroll down) chip.

After the reunificiation there was a huge skilled workforce in microelectronics readily available in Dresden. This was, and is, aside from gouvernment incentives a major reason to build fabs there. Siemens (and now Infineon) were the first to take advantage of this. AMD came later.

The fabs have been extremely successful so far. Infineons fab was the first to have mass production on 300mm wafers world wide. AMDs fab managed to ramp the copper/low-k metallization process in record time.

Btw. some of the GDR semiconductor companies still live on in form of ZMD (Dresden), X-FAB (in Erfurt) and the IHP (Frankfurt/Oder). However they mostly specialize in niche products now.

From the Article:
Check out the pictures of Fab 36, their new plant slated to open.

You wish. There is no photo showing the actual production at an AMD site. One photo shows some support level, another photo does actually show the production of an entirely different company.

They're made from PEOPLE!

[WillAffleckUW]

Oops. Sorry.

I was reading from the FUD PR put out by Intel about AMD.

A chip is a chip, except when you put salsa on it.

Or have it with some Java.

Motherboards

[superpulpsicle]

How about manufacturing AMD motherboards. The Intel chip + Intel board is a ridiculously stable combination. AMD should have a combo of their own to counter.

Re:Motherboards

[ad0gg]

They used to have their own chipset and it sucked(speedwise and feature wise) compared to the VIA chipset that was out at the same time. AMD doesn't need its own chipset now since Nvidia makes a really great chipset.

Re:Motherboards

[Herr_Nightingale]

I've found the nVidia nForce 3/4 to be better than Intel's latest; AMD's HTT makes a huge difference for memory-intensive computation :)
With Intel having HT it's probably 6(1) or 1/2 dozen t'other, but I like my nForce.

Crystal ball sees press release --

[SpookyFish]

Early '06:
"Dell considering building machines with AMD thanks to new fab capacity"

Early '06 + 1 week:
"Dell sticking with Intel"

Well, at least it will help remove one of the theories (AMD supposedly not having the capacity).

New toys aren't cheap

[tofucubes]

better have a big wallet...looks like a lot of geeks will be window shopping... the low-end Opteron 865 chip will cost $1,514 USD dual-core Opteron 870 will run $2,149, with the Opteron 875 priced at $2,649 http://www.betanews.com/article/DualCore_AMD_Opter on_Prices_Leak/1113922595

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[CajunArson]

Opteron 865 chip...
If you want to build a 4/8 way machine (which is the only reason to buy from the 8x series) $1500 is not a bad price for a chip at all, and $2149 for the dual-core is only ~40% markup! If you want cheap.. buy a normal PC, after all the extra CPU's won't make your games faster and many of the server boards that take these chips don't even bother with high-speed graphics ports since they're designed to be servers. Opterons are cheap (err.. inexpensive) compared to Itaniums or other 64 bit architectures out there.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[ciroknight]

The real problem is, AMD's Opteron will probably be done and shipping by the time Intel gets 64-bit dual core Xeons out the door. Not that they couldn't go ahead and shift all of their production capacity to dual core now, and have early chips ready by the end of this year, it's more like they won't.

More and more I get my hopes up that Intel is doing research into a 64-bit enhancement for the Pentium-M, and I believe this to be the only reason we haven't seen Dual Core Pentium-M's yet. We're just now starting to see a move for the Pentium-M to the desktop, which is a good start, but without the cutting edge memory controllers present on new chipsets, it doesn't stand a chance.

I believe Intel is also probably investigating adding memory controllers to their next Xeon line, which is definitely going to extend the amount of time in which we expect to see it. Intel really would see this as defeat, but as DDR2 becomes prime, Opteron's with DDR2 controllers will be able to completely smash any Intel offering, simply because it can get the data faster, get it processed, and pumped back out, while the Intel chips still wait for the laggy north bridge memory host to allocate the resources.

Reliability will always be in Intel's court, simply because they control all factors of production, beginning to end. AMD's trying to take this approach, and by opening new fab facilities, maybe they can get into competition in other chip segments (like the Turion vs the Pentium-M). It also doesn't help that AMD is no longer making chipsets, but I believe a new fab facility will open this up as a possibility once again.

Oh I love competition.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[ciroknight]

By integrating the memory controller, they've assured low latency. DDR2 simply says they can get all of the data they need all at once, and store it in a local cache. Meanwhile, the Pentium 4 beast is a memory hungry chip; most operations the chip spends its time toiling on are operations that require a lot of data (SIMD) (why do you think they hyped it for movies and such??). This means the Pentium 4 has to hit the memory bus more often, or increase its cache size. We've already seen the Prescott go up to a 2 meg cache, and the Extreme Edition go up to an L3 cache to keep local copies of even more data, but it's simply not enough to keep the Pentium 4 competitive (not to mention it drives up the thermal profile of the chip quite a bit). The fact is it simply needs to go to local memory more often. Integrating a memory controller makes it cheaper to go to local memory, instead of waiting on the North Bridge to fetch the information from memory and send it back up the pipe. This is why A64 can go to ram, pick up huge chunks of memory at once, process it, and send it back, while Intel's Netburst chips sit and wait, idling their time away.

Processors have actually gotten too fast for their respective systems. AMD tries to get around this by bringing the memory closer to the chip. Intel's trying to get around it to bringing the memory on the chip, and Intel's approach isn't working as well as they'd hoped.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[VoidWraith]

A single G5 is not in the same bracket as these new Opterons. If you want an AMD chip to compare to G5s, look at Athlon-64s. I'm not speaking about Suns, because frankly I don't know enough about them.

Your suggestion of using more less expensive processors works for x86 processors too. Why use an opteron 8xx when you could use a few Athlon-64s? That's the sort of approach Google takes, redundant arrays of inexpensive computers.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[greg_barton]

This is FUD. The 865 is not "low end" no matter what the article says. It's the chip that's capable of 8 way SMP, as opposed to the 2 and 1 way. Those are cheaper.

Here is the source article for the price leak from DigiTimes. The prices for the 1 and 2 level chips are much less:

165 chip: $637
265 chip: $851

Don't believe the FUD.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[evilviper]

A single G5 will run you about $1500,

Okay, but the Opteron in question is a DUAL-CORE chip, for servers only (desktop chips are much less expensive), still unreleased, and it's only the MSRP, whereas the real price you can buy them for will surely be lower.

Besides, that is the high-end Opteron. The low-end dual-core chip is the 165 for $637.

4 XServes be cheapter to assemble, run, and maintain than the processors used to make one 8-way Opteron server.

Yes, but people that need an 8-way system can't just use 4x 2-way systems, otherwise they'd be doing that! Just as people that bought a 64-bit system so they could use 16GBs of memory, can't just have 4GBs of RAM in 4 different systems instead...

If they wanted the equivalent of an XServe, they'd be going with lower-end Opterons, such as the $637 one. The parent even said as much in the first sentence, which you completely ignored. Show me an 8-way G5 system, and then you can compare prices...

Here's a question...

[DrKyle]

Why is the building so darn yellow inside? Is it important for the process, the workers, the ability to keep the environment clean? It's just so yellow, I think I'd get a huge headache working there.

Re:Here's a question...

[Blapto]

True fact:
When I was at school, the walls were painted "bright spark yellow". According to our teacher, studies had been done and it was found that this particular colour made people think more productively. He had entire studies to give us and everything, being 11 I'm not quite sure what we did with them.

Re:Here's a question...

[tofucubes]

I have a theory: the workers would feel they're missing out when they where yellow goggles, so they painted the place all yellow...

personally I thought it was kind of like golden, but that's just me

Re:Here's a question...

[Zocalo]

If you are talking about a clean room, then it's part of the environmental control. In addition to the usual temperature, humidity and particulate matter controls, you also need to regulate static, ionisation and the lighting. The silicon wafers, the photomasks and other manufacturing devices are incredibly sensitive to all those things at varying stages of production. Basically the design of a chip is projected onto the silicon wafer in a manner kind of like projecting a photographic transparency onto a projection screen, except that the image from the photomask is made smaller rather than larger. The photomasks are quite sensitive to certain wavelengths of light, hence the special lighting requirements.

Besides, once you are cooped up inside one of those natty suits that you have to wear in modern chip fabrication environments, believe me when I say that the lighting is *not* a major concern... I'm certainly not complaining if I don't have to do any work in our clean room environment on a given day. OK, yes, it is *very* cool at first though! ;)

Re:Here's a question...

[El]

It's not yellow. The picture is shot through a window, which has a UV-blocking coating on it. This makes everything appear yellow. Apparently certain frequencies of light are bad for the wafers.

Chipsets would suffice

[toadlife]

Back when AMD still made chipsets for their own chips, the motherboards that used them were incredibly stable. I wish they hadn't stopped making them.

Re:Chipsets would suffice

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It seems the only boards that bothered with AMD chipsets were boards intended for server and workstations.

I think the 8000 series chipsets are still made, but generally are only put in Opteron systems. They had not yet made a PCIe replacement for the 813x chips. I think that update will become necessary in the next year to keep pace in the server market, though PCI-X seems to still be going pretty strong.

Re:Chipsets would suffice

[ajlitt]

AMD still makes chipsets, but they're pretty much never found in desktop configurations. AMD produces chipsets mainly as a platform to help get the chips on the market before third party chipset manufacturers get a design out. Seems that third parties aren't keen on investing in a chipset design without seeing what the part looks like in real life.

the dual hardware trend

[tofucubes]

dual cpu and gpu...
I'm betting the same people who bought SLI configs are going to buy dual core...
the problem with dual core vs. SLI is that people can buy one video card now and one later...
which is not the case with dual core

anyway I wonder if this all started people buying two of the same ram modules for more bandwidth performance

and I wonder if this trend will continue?

Re:down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

did. 3Q 2004. $43.8million net profit.

Any market for single-core-only rejects?

[G4from128k]

Looking at the die layout, its easy to imagine that AMD (and Intel) will be produces a good many dual-core chips with one defective core (maybe 10-25% of production). I'd bet that somebody finds a market for those partially-functional chips. I also wonder what will happen when people discover that one core can be overclocked more than another core. For applications/loads that only use a single core, the system could disable the slow core and run the fast core at full speed.

Re:Any market for single-core-only rejects?

[edwdig]

The dual core chips with one defective core will simply be sold as single core chips. The single and dual core chips both use the same motherboards, so really the only way someone could tell them apart would be by the writing on it anyway.

As to overclocking, there's only one bus and one clock driving both chips, so you can't clock them differently.

Re:Any market for single-core-only rejects?

[Fulcrum of Evil]

That is like saying people who plunk down a few hundred thousand dollars for a really nice (or at least expensive) car or boat will not tune it. $1600 is dirt cheap for a 4-way configuration; I expect that the overclockers will give it a lot more attention than they give current quad-cpu offerings.

Exactly. At $300k, you're buying a pretuned car that is damn fast and difficult to improve on. A $1600/cpu 4way box starts at around $10k or more and is useless for games. I can't see overclockers spending the price of a cheap car on a computer just to crank up the speed and burn it out. That's potentially a $6400 mistake.

Speed differences were negligable

[toadlife]

I seem to remember the speed differences between the VIA and AMD chipsets to be pretty small. I would take improved stability over a 5% gain in performance any day.

My wife still uses my old Athon 750 machine with a gigabyte MB/AMD chipset. That machine has been rock solid for five years now. Back when I still used it I did all the standard benchmarks and compared them to other Athlon 750 machines, and mine with it's 'slow' AMD chipset compared just fine.

Lions and Tigers and Chips, oh my...

[ndykman]

Firstly, after reading the article, I was shocked to note that AMDs processors come out of one fab line, and the American fab line was flash only. If this is the case, well, wow. That seems a bit risky. If you get a tricky or persistent process issue (and it happens, no matter how cool you are), that seems like it could really impact AMDs output and yield a good deal.

Of course, that's the main question here, and no way you are going to find out that answer. Yield. How many chips are good in a wafer?

You can guess, but the answer may speak alot about AMD and Intel. It could very well be (here comes the flames) that Intel has an advantage in being consistent in volume and yield that allows them to keep large-scale contracts.

It is a big question in my mind if AMD can currently provide the large-scale on demand volume that the big companies require in some product lines. Could an HP, a Gateway rely exclusively on AMD for chips? (I don't know)

Certainly, it seems that have one fab plant only could be a big bottleneck or issue to make major vendors concerned and place a cloud on that question.

Toss in this which the fact that you can get chipsets (heck, network chips if you'd like) from Intel as well, and you have a real competitive advantage that is tough to beat. All your motherboard bits, one vendor.

And, sure, Intel chips have disadvantages, but in real-world experiences, the performance of similarly priced AMD and Intel desktop solutions aren't so obviously different that most people will notice enough to overcome those other issues at play.

Just a thought.

Re:Lions and Tigers and Chips, oh my...

[Brain_Recall]

Quite right. The Austin plant hasn't done CPUs since the aluminium Athlon days (think Thunderbird core).

But we are talking about the Dresden Fab 30, which was for a long time considered the most advanced fab in the world.

"In May 2001, Fab 30 was awarded the coveted "Fab of the Year" title by Semiconductor International. The magazine recognized Fab 30 as the first facility in the world specifically designed to produce microprocessors with copper interconnects." http://www.amdboard.com/amdfab30.html

With over 150,000 square feet of clean-room, it could, and does, handle the load.

As a side note, here's AnandTech's tour of Fab 30: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.html? i=1773

Here's an answer

[SlightlyOldGuy]

They took the photo through a yellow-tinted clean-room window. Taking a camera into a clean room is a lot of work and bother (it has to be, well, cleaned). I think the widows are tinted to prevent UV transmission or something.

Re:down the drain

[Martin Blank]

Quarterly results going back to 1999:

1999 Q1: ($128.4M)
1999 Q2: ($162.0M)
1999 Q3: ($105.5M)
1999 Q4: $65.1M

2000 Q1: $189.3M
2000 Q2: $207.1M
2000 Q3: $408.6M
2000 Q4: $178.0M

2001 Q1: $124.8M
2001 Q2: $17.4M
2001 Q3: ($97.4M)
2001 Q4: ($15.8M)

2002 Q1: ($9.2M)
2002 Q2: ($185.0M)
2002 Q3: ($254.2M)
2002 Q4: ($854.8M)

2003 Q1: ($146.4M)
2003 Q2: ($140.1M)
2003 Q3: ($31.2M)
2003 Q4: $43.2M

2004 Q1: $45.1M
2004 Q2: $32.2M
2004 Q3: $43.9M
2004 Q4: ($30.0M)

2005 Q1: ($17.4M)

At the vert least, 2000 did seem to be a good year for them, and losses (when they have occurred) have been light in the last 18 months.

Thunderbirds?

[Sanguis Mortuum]

Fab 36? Wow, the Thunderbirds have come a long way since the initial 1-5.....

Re:Thunderbirds?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, AMD's FAB naming convention refers to the year (relative to AMD's founding) that the FAB opened. So FAB 25 in Austin was built when AMD was 25 years old, FAB 30 in Dresden when AMD was 30 and now FAB 36 when AMD turns 36.

Re:200 & 300 mm???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the wafers really are that big.

Remember, a great many chips are made from each
wafer (the same pattern, or die, is repeated many times across the wafer surface, which allows for many chips to be made in parallel). They are cut into chips with a saw at the last stage.

Don't open the door, I'm Developing CPUs!

[kesuki]

Doh you opened the door, now this batch is all shot!

As many have stated here, if the window is tinted yellow, the room inside infact has all yellow (amber) lighting. This is because much as a photo negative will expose under more than the slightest infrared lighting, CPUs will not be etched correctly if exposed to UV rays in the wrong areas.

The entire building is not yellow, as only certain processes are UV sensative, and once the part has been given the needed chemical baths they are no longer light sensitive.

White light would burn out the chips about to be etched as surely as opening the door to a dark room before the film/photo paper can be given it's chemical bath to 'crystalize' the paper/films light sensitivity.