Cutting Edge: Intel's Fab 32 (Arizona)

Intel's Fab 32 is a Cutting Edge $3 Billion Dollar, 300mm Fab with a 45nm process that will go into production in the second half of 2007 (Now!). Intel's Press Release and video tell you almost everything you need to know:

"When completed, Fab 32 will become Intel's sixth 300-mm wafer facility. The structure will be about 1 million square feet with 184,000 square feet of clean room space. The project will create up to 1000 new Intel jobs at the Arizona site over the next several years. During the construction phase, more than 3,000 skilled trades people will be hired to work on the project.

Intel currently operates four 300-mm fabs that provide the equivalent manufacturing capacity of about eight 200-mm factories. Those factories are located in Oregon, Ireland and New Mexico. The company also has an additional 300 mm fab currently under construction in Arizona (Fab 12) scheduled to begin operations later this year, and one expansion in Ireland (Fab 24-2) scheduled to begin operations in the first quarter of next year.

Manufacturing with 300-mm wafers (about 12 inches in diameter) dramatically increases the ability to produce semiconductors at a lower cost compared with more widely used 200-mm (eight-inch) wafers. The total silicon surface area of a 300-mm wafer is 225 percent, or more than twice that of a 200-mm wafer, and the number of printed die (individual computer chips) is increased to 240 percent. The bigger wafers lower the production cost per chip while diminishing overall use of resources. Three-hundred-mm wafer manufacturing will use 40 percent less energy and water per chip than a 200-mm wafer factory."

Semiconductor Manufacturing Revisited

Because of the complexity involved in manufacturing semiconductor chips, I thought it would be worth providing some additional reading material in addition to the Applied Materials technical tutorials. Hardware Secrets and Tom's Hardware are both good sites for computer articles, so you may also want to check out their other articles sometime.


I have spent some time inside cleanroom environments, and they are quite an interesting place to be. The machinery is very expensive costing in the millions of dollars for many tools, and the air generally contains less than 10 particles ≥0.5 µm (microns) in diameter (200 times smaller than the size of a human hair). In layman's terms: If you have a job in which you work inside a cleanroom and you go to work and have allergies that morning, you will feel great inside the cleanroom because there are no particles (dust, pollen, etc.) to affect you! The air is kept clean by a huge air handler system that circulates a large volumne of air through HEPA filters that capture any particulate.


The last bit of information worth adding about semiconductor manufacturing is that it is a very complex environment from a production control perspective. Many products in the world are made by batch processes such as paper, chemicals, Coca-Cola, etc. On the other hand many products are made in discrete units with a lot of 1 (Cars are a good example). Semiconductors wafers are generally run together as a lot, but you sometimes split or merge wafers from that original lot and to a secondary lot. Additionally, in some tools you input a lot of wafers (say a quantity of 25), but the tool processes the wafers individually (these tools are fittlingly called single wafer processors). To make things even more difficult there are sometimes batch tools such as diffusion furnances (as shown on the right) where you place multiple lots into the furnace and wait several hours for the processing to finish. In summary, line balancing is very important and can make a large impact on how smoothly the wafers are processed!

So on to the articles:
How Chips are Manufactured brought to you by Hardware Secrets
Semiconductor Production 101brought to you by Tom's Hardware

Technical Tutorials: How to Make a Chip & Flat Panel Display

This isn't exactly a plant tour, but these Technical Tutorials made by Applied Materials have some good information on how semiconductors are made. Some of the presentations are a little long, but you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the steps required to manufacture a chip. The two directly linked tutorials are How to Make a Chip and How to Make a Flat Panel Display respectively. Other presentations available at the Applied Materials How We Do It page include:
What is Nanomanufacturing Technology
What is Solar Electric Power,
How to Make a Transistor,
How Clean is Clean,
Build a Transistor Challenge ,
How to Make a Chip,
How to Make a Flat Panel Display

SMT Machines Amaze me...

With coverage on the two Plant tours below (Kingmax and Gigabyte) I thought it was worth sharing more information on Surface-mount technology (SMT) machinery such as the Fuji machine pictured to the right. For high volume products with many components (chips, capacitors, resistors, etc.) SMTs are generally a sound investment, as can be seen by their speed (0.068 Seconds per Component aka 40,000 cph) and precision (Placing Accuracy:+/- 0.0039 in. aka +/-0.1mm). As if the speed and precision weren't enough, surface mount components (SMCs) are generally smaller than their leaded counterparts, so the overall PCB and therefore the entire electronic device can be made smaller.

In order to utilize Surface mount technology, surface mount components must be purchased. An SMT component is usually smaller than its leaded counterpart because it has no leads or smaller leads. It may have short pins or leads of various styles, flat contacts, a matrix of balls (BGAs), or terminations on the body of the component (passives). The part shown in the picture on the left has 112 pins on it. To do this as a standard DIP, the part would be nearly 7 inches in length! That is just too big. With SMT, this part is a little under 1 square inch.


So on to the videos..... I have never seen a SMT machine operate in person, but I would equate the fastest machines of the bunch as essentially being component gatling guns!


Gigabyte Mainboard Factory


Fuji pick and place

Kingmax Plant Tour

Today's Plant Tour is the of the Kingmax Memory packaging and memory module factory in Hsin Chu, Taiwan. Kingmax performs their own chip packaging, which you do not see quite as often, and also assembles finished memory modules. As far as I could ascertain, Micron used to be a large supplier of Kingmax's chips, but now it could be any of the memory manufacturers; Micron, Promos, Samsung, etc.

Gigabyte Plant Tour

Today's Plant tour is of the Gigabyte Nan-Ping Factory in Taiwan. To provide some background, GIGABYTE, which was founded in 1986, has become one of the world's largest motherboard manufacturers. In addition to motherboards, GIGABYTE has further expanded its product portfolio to include graphics cards, notebook and desktop PCs, digital home entertainment appliances, networking servers, and other electronic products.

Gigabyte allowed several sites to provide plant tour coverage, so there is both a short, 2 minute video made by Firing Squad (2006), and detailed virtual tour with commentary from PCStats (2005). The factory assembles both motherboards and graphics cards, and is a great primer for those who have never looked at the detailed steps involved in making today's latest electronics. Many people do not realize that the whole process of manufacturing PCBs and similiar devices is very manual labor intesive, and therefore is almost always performed offshore from the US.

"Without a doubt, motherboards are the most complex and essential part of the
modern PC. Not only do they hold the chipsets that pass data from peripherals,
drives and memory to the processor, they also provide slots and ports for all
your other system components and the circuits through which all data must pass.
Perhaps surprisingly then, motherboards get very little respect in the computing
press as compared to other components. They are perpetually the team player and
not the star of the show, and are generally priced as such.

With this in mind, it's surprising to learn the amount of work and machinery involved in manufacturing a single motherboard. We'd vaguely imagined some sort of stamping process where all components are slapped onto the bare board in one step and soldered, before being boxed in a big room full of bored workers. Sure there'd
have to be some testing, but how intense could it be?"