Combjelly, Re: "With the pod system used at Fab30, most of the handling problems become less of an issue. So the accidents go way down."
Accidents don't account for a large number of bad wafers, but having an automated system will help a little. Other things to worry about are impurities in the chemicals, bad settings on some of the equipment used to focus light, create the masks, or implant various layers, or contamination of defect particles in one of the various stages of development.
Also remember that even automated fabs need humans to program how the robots operate, and programmers make mistakes, too.
"As far as boutique starts, do you see any sign that AMD does a significant amount of that?"
Do you think AMD reaches their clock speeds solely based on design improvements?
"Same with development starts. Most of that is done in their research fabs."
Huh?? Maybe long term research is done in a development fab, but every time you change a setting on the equipment, every time you come up with an idea to increase yields, and every time you bring new processes or machinery online, you had better be doing some test runs of your changes. This takes a non-zero amount of fab space to accommodate.
wanna_bmw |
