Semiconductor Foundry

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Semiconductor Industry - SemiSurplus
Semisurplus rates and sells a large variety of used industrial manufacturing equipment, with an emphasis on the semiconductor industry. Tireless efforts and commitment to our clients.
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CMP Polish Foundry and Equipment Service
CMP Polish services - CMP foundry services for production and development needs; CMP equipment services; refurbished CMP equipment and metrology.
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Semiconductor fabrication plant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
... also produce its own designs, it is known as a pure-play semiconductor foundry. ... Categories: Semiconductor device fabrication | Foundry semiconductor companies ...
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Industry:Semiconductor - Foundry
The largest investing wiki with research on hundreds of companies, investment concepts, and more. ... Semiconductor Foundries manufacture integrated circuits ...
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Foundry - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A foundry is a factory which produces metal castings from either ferrous or non-ferrous alloys. ... In a foundry, molten metal is poured into molds. ...
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Foundry Services
Foundry Services. Freescale Semiconductor provides strategic foundry services ... Freescale Semiconductor's Foundry team is proud to present "state-of-the-art" ...
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foundry: Definition from Answers.com
foundry n. , pl. -dries . An establishment where metal is melted and poured into molds. The skill or operation of founding ... Video: "Caution: Foundry at Work" ...
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Peregrine Semiconductor - Foundry
We're changing the way you design RF. Forever. Peregrine's environmentally-friendly UltraCMOS RF ICs deliver unprecedented linearity, excellent ESD tolerance and ...
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This article is about the factory in which integrated circuits are made. For other uses of the term 'foundry see foundry (disambiguation). Fabs redirects here. For the antibody region, see Fragment antigen binding.

In the microelectronics industry, a foundry (also called a fab for fabrication plant) is a factory where devices like integrated circuits are manufactured. When the term "Foundry" is applied to a fab, it means that there are many devices being made at that fab for one or more customers. A fab that only has one product, or just one customer is generally not called a foundry.

Foundries require many expensive devices to function. Estimates put the cost of building a new foundry over one 1000000000 (number) US Dollars with values as high as 3-4 billion US Dollars not being uncommon.

The central part of a foundry is the clean room, an area where the environment is controlled to eliminate all dust, since even a single speck can ruin a microcircuit, which has features much smaller than dust. The clean room must also be dampened against vibration and kept within narrow bands of temperature and humidity. Controlling temperature and humidity is critical for minimizing static electricity.

The clean room also contains the steppers for photolithography, etching, cleaning, doping (semiconductors) and dicing machines. All these devices are extremely precise and thus extremely expensive. Prices for most common pieces of equipment for the processing of 300mm wafers ranges from $700,000 US Dollars to upwards of $4,000,000 US Dollars each with a few pieces of equipment reaching as high as $30,000,000 US Dollars each (i.e. steppers). A typical fab will have several hundred equipment items.

Evolution Typically an advance in chip-making technology requires a completely new foundry to be built. In the past, the equipment to outfit a foundry was not terribly expensive and there were a huge number of smaller fabs producing low-volume chips. However, the cost of the most up-to-date equipment has since grown to the point where a new foundry can cost on the order of several billion dollars.Another side effect of the cost has been the challenge to make use of older fabs. For many companies these older fabs are useful for producing designs for unique markets, such as embedded processors, flash memory, and microcontrollers. However for companies with more limited product lines, it's often best to either rent out the fab, or close it entirely. This is due to the tendency of the cost of upgrading an existing fab to produce devices requiring newer technology to exceed the cost of a completely new fab.

There has been a trend to produce ever larger wafer (electronics)s, so each process step is being performed on more and more chips at once. The goal is to spread production costs (chemicals, fab time) over a larger number of saleable chips. Unfortunately it is impossible (or at least impractical) to retrofit machinery to handle larger wafers. This is not to say that foundries using smaller wafers are necessarily obsolete; older foundries can be cheaper to operate, have higher yields for simple chips and still be productive.

The current state-of-the-art for wafer size is considered to be 300mm (12 in). However, more than half of current wafer manufacturing capacity in the United States is tooled for the 200 mm (8 in) size; 300 mm production is not expected to exceed 200 mm production until 2008. However, Intel is currently pushing semiconductor equipment manufacturers to move to the 450mm wafer size. Additionally, there is a large push to completely automate the production of semiconductor chips from beginning to end. This is often referred to as the "lights-out fab" concept. A similar phenomenon was witnessed in the automobile manufacturing business during the 1980's.

The International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI), an extension of the US consortium SEMATECH, is sponsoring the "300 mm Prime" initiative. An important goal of this initiative are to enable fabs to produce smaller lots of chips; this is a response to shorter lifecycles seen in consumer electronics. The logic is that a fab that can produce smaller lots can more easily and efficiently switch its production to supply chips for a variety electronic devices as they rapidly emerge in the marketplace. Another important goal is to reduce fabrication time by reducing the waiting time between processing steps.Chip Makers Watch Their WasteISMI Press Release

References

Chip Makers Watch Their Waste, Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2007, p.B3
ISMI Press Release