Cost Factors

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.
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Today’s state-of-the-art fabs, such asTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation’s (TSMC) ‘Gigafab’, cost nearly $10 billion.