FABRICATION CHALLENGES

Industry Challenges

Innovations in the semiconductor industry have led to dramatic advancements in manufacturing. Quality, function, cost and time factor improvements have been remarkable, but equipment prices and manufacturing costs have skyrocketed as the size of circuits decrease and wafer sizes increase to allow for more circuits at decreased costs per unit.

The cost of building a fabrication plant has increased by over 5,000% in the last 30 years.
In 1980, a typical state-of-the-art fabrication plant, or ‘fab’, cost approximately $100 million to build. Ownership of such a facility was common for electronics companies who competitively conducted their own research and development and developed specialized processing flows.

Today, a truly state-of-the-art fab, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation’s (TSMC) “Gigafab”, costs nearly $10 billion. Given a liberal operating lifetime of 10 years, the fab will need to produce nearly $20 million of gross margin output every week of its life just to cover depreciation costs.

Investments such as these have led to significant consolidation in the industry and even for the select few industry ‘players’ still competing there are significant barriers to generate unique  processes or competitive innovations.

Cost Factors

Some of the factors contributing to today’s fabricator costs include:

Tools and Equipment:
To facilitate efficiency and ever-increasing demands, tools and equipment have become larger in size and more specialized in their applications. Resulting challenges include:

• Tools produce large amounts of material but are themselves exceptionally expensive.  Cost effectiveness requires large production volumes.
• Tools cannot be designed for modularity and must remain stationary once  installed
• A large labor force of maintenance technicians and engineers  must be maintained on location for immediate response to any arising issues
• Cost structures have made it almost impossible for tool makers to innovate
• Tool breakdowns can cripple the manufacturing process since especially for the most expensive tool types minimal numbers must be employed.

Cleanroom Requirements:
Fabs are pressurized with filtered air flowing from a high ceiling through a cleanroom floor to remove all particles down to extremely small sizes. Workers are required to wear cleanroom suits to protect the devices from human contamination. Such an environment means:

• Significant costs to operate and maintain the cleanroom environment
• Inefficiencies and limitations in productivity such as the need to ’gown’ and ‘degown’.
• Vulnerability of personnel to effects of materials in the work environment.  (Especially as nano-sized materials emerge.)

Infrastructure Limitations:
Large volume fabrication facilities must, by default, be very large and bring their own set of limitations such as:

• Installation locations are limited due to land, power and utility requirements
• Large work forces must often be developed around ‘acceptable’ locations
• Purification systems for air and water create significant infrastructure cost
• Fabricators create large amounts of hazardous waste materials that require specialized non-municipal solutions.

Resulting Challenges

The economic realities of building, maintaining and operating today’s typical state-of-the-art facility have resulted in numerous challenges and limitations.

Design Flexibility:

Most products incorporating semiconductor devices have a very short life cycle and changes in the semiconductor market occur rapidly. This situation demands high degrees of flexibility and innovation to constantly adjust to the rapid pace of change.

However, with today’s economic pressures, companies face high risks when placing ‘novel’ designs into large volume production lines and the costs of failure can decimate a company. Under the circumstances, it is difficult, if not impossible, for designers to test and implement radical changes.

Designers today face challenges unseen by their early predecessors, like:

• Research and Development is often accomplished in shared facilities thousands of miles away from the designers
• Prototyping is restricted to standardized flows
• A disrupted design process causes frustration and less creative solutions
• Small volume experimentation is virtually impossible
• Design innovation is discouraged due to the high cost/risk  levels
• Young engineers are not able to be trained in realistic fabrication settings

Shared Resources:
Due to the obvious economic pressures, fabs usually ‘share’ facilities amongst several competitive companies to perform research and development. Challenges arising from such a scenario include:

• Geometrically increased security issues and access restrictions
• Generic design of equipment  to allow for the widest possible application to shared partner applications
• Participating companies forced to conform designs and technologies to fit generic manufacturing requirements
• Innovation is repressed

Research and Development and Early Product Ramp up Cycle Times:
By its very nature, Research and Development is small volume activity. Due to the inhibitions of the current cost structure on all activity of small volume every step of the R&D chain is set with significant increases in the times to perform the steps

• New materials have to be developed to scale up to large wafer sizes before testing or utilization… a hurdle which may become so large at 18 inch sizes that some new materials may never make it
• New equipment concepts, designs and improvements must be proven on the largest wafer dimension before any sales can be realized to support the innovation.
• The number of players capable of providing equipment solutions is minimal due to the cost
• Tooling improvements take longer in some cases (like EUV)  perhaps causing the entire industry to backlog its innovation cycle time
• Affordable new design development on “MPW” vehicles run at limited schedules on standard processing – the concept of a continuous flow of new design  options/enhancements/reliability improvements is long gone.
• The costliness of the cleanroom environment puts a premium on space in the cleanroom…  tools like test and packaging tools which need less stringent requirements must be segregated for economic logic.
• New devices or non-standard processes have extreme hurdles to overcome to be developed even in the few shared/old tool facilities existing for the purpose.

Summation

It is clear that the demands of today’s (and tomorrow’s) global market ensure that the large volume manufacturing of semiconductors and integrated circuits will continue to be vital in the decades ahead. However, it is equally clear that as the industry continues to expand its capabilities in larger and larger scales, a crossroad of sorts is approaching.

Designers and engineers are hungry for a solution that will allow them to freely envision innovative design changes, then test and implement those ideas in economically viable vehicles.

A novel solution is needed. It is time for an affordable, small volume manufacturing platform that will empower innovation instead of chaining it. A platform that will allow companies with vision to once again forge new roads in technological achievement. A platform that will encourage the development of revolutionary ideas through smaller and less expensive implementation.

A Futrfab.

About Semiconductor Manufacturing

Semiconductor device fabrication is the process used to manufacture the integrated circuits present in electrical and electronic devices. It is a multiple-step sequence of photolithographic and chemical processing during which electronic circuits are formed upon highly polished wafers made of pure semiconducting material (silicon) about 0.75 mm thick.

The process is performed in highly specialized fabrication facilities referred to as fabricators, or ‘fabs’. Typically, the final product’s entire manufacturing process, from start to packaged chips ready for shipment, encompasses several months.

Although the birth of semiconductors can be traced to a much earlier date, it’s widely accepted that the integrated circuit industry as a whole emerged around 1960, once design and fabrication of complex semiconductor devices became a viable business.

Roughly 50 years later, design and fabrication of semiconductor devices has grown to approximately $250 billion worldwide. The industry enables the generation of some $1.2 trillion in electronic systems business and $5 trillion in services, representing close to 10% of the world’s GDP. ¹