450mm in 2017: It's coming

05/01/2013

Pete Singer,

Editor-in-Chief

The switch to 450mm will likely be the largest, most expensive retooling the semiconductor industry has ever experienced. 450mm fabs, which will give an unbeatable competitive advantage to the largest semiconductor manufacturers, are likely to cost $10 billion and come on-line in 2017, with production ramp in 2018.

Unprecedented technical challenges still need to be overcome, but work is well underway at an R&D center in upstate New York, at the Global 450mm Consortium, G450C. Paul Farrar Jr., the G450C General Manager, recently spoke on the current status of activities, key milestones and schedules during a webcast produced by Solid State Technology.

"At this point, we have contracts with 12 major suppliers, and we have tools that are being delivered to the consortium starting in April and continuing through 2015," Farrar said.

The G450C team now has over 60 engineers and assignees from the member companies. The goal is to have more than 150 engineers by 2014, with approximately 60 supplier engineers on site. "2013 and early 2014 will be about getting tools installed and up and running. Then the integration and unit process scientists will continue from there," Farrar said.

Farrar said G450C has commitments for 112 process levels. For 45 processes, two suppliers are developing products (which equates to 90 process levels). A few have three suppliers, and about 10 process steps have one supplier. Farrar said that he sees 300mm and 450mm development continuing simultaneously. "We certainly know that for the next six or seven years, the industry will be developing and bringing capability to both 300mm and 450mm. A key goal here is to make sure that we do not slow down the scaling required for Moore's Law to go from say 20nm to 15 to 12 to 10, etc. versus the cost reduction you get from going to a larger wafer size. We need to both of these things simultaneously as an industry," he said. "A rough target is to get to 10nm, and then in 2016 we want to be ready for IC makers to make their decisions on when they will ramp to 450mm."

Solid State Technology | Volume 56 | Issue 3 | May 2013