Siemens-Motorola venture makes 64-Mbit DRAM on 300-mm wafer
By Jack Robertson
semibiznews.com
A service of Semiconductor Business News, CMP Media Inc.
Story posted 7:30 a.m. EST/4:30 a.m., PST, 2/11/99
WASHINGTON -- A joint venture between Siemens AG and Motorola Inc. today announced the fabrication of a 64-megabit DRAM test chip on a 300-mm wafer pilot line in Dresden, Germany.
The two partners said it was the first time that a fully-functional IC had been produced on a 300-mm substrate, marking a key milestone in the industry's arduous transition to larger diameter wafers.
"We proved working designs of real products can be fabricated on 300-mm wafers," said Peter Kuecher, program manager from Siemens involved in the Semiconductor 300 joint-venture pilot line project. A year ago, Siemens and Motorola launched the joint venture to become the first to operate a 300-mm pilot line while the rest of the chip industry wrestled with costs of migrating from today's 200-mm (8-inch) wafers to 12-inch substrates (see story from February 1998 issue of SBN).
The announcement of the working prototype comes as Intel Corp. prepares to restart its 300-mm pilot line efforts in Hillsboro, Ore. According to company and industry sources, Intel intends to soon announce it is now ready to begin equipping the $1.5 billion facility (see Feb 2. story). Intel put project on hold last April when it decided 300-mm tools were not ready and the overall market conditions were too poor to push ahead with the pilot line.
Other 300-mm projects have also been delayed or canceled, causing many equipment suppliers to downgrade their tool development efforts while they wait for demand to pick up again. Some advocates of larger-diameter wafers hope Intel's expected announcement in March and today's announcement by the Siemens-Motorola partnership will help to encourage other companies to move ahead with 300-mm projects.
The Siemens-Motorola joint venture decided to produce a DRAM with the complexity of today's memory products instead of a simple reference design on 300-mm wafers to prove out the pilot line's processes and tools, according to Kuecher. He said the next step is to build and qualify a 64-Mbit DRAM engineering sample, which is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
By the end of 1999, the joint venture intends to qualify a full set of 300-mm wafer tools for volume production, said the Siemens manager. A full complement of 100 tools was used to make the 64-Mbit reference test device, but much of the 300-mm equipment was still considered to be "alpha" grades, or early prototypes, according to Kuecher.
"We are continuing to help vendors refine and qualify their tools," he said. "We will end up with a complete tool set ready to go into production whenever we decide to move into that phase."
"This is essential for building a 300-mm production fab," Kuecher explained. "The investment cost will be so high that you cannot afford to wait the usual 18-to-24 months from ground-breaking to initial production for 200-mm fabs. You must start getting a return far more quickly, and all the pilot line experience we are getting will help us do just that."
Motorola no longer is participating in the DRAM market, but the 64-Mbit test memory can still help the U.S. company prepare for 300-mm wafer production, said Horia Grecu, Motorola's program manager in the joint venture. Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, based in Austin, Tex., intends to use 12-inch wafers to drive down the cost of logic products in the next decade.
Neither partner, however, has come up with any final plan for building a 300-mm production fab. Grecu said Motorola's planned "superfab" at West Creek, Va.--near Richmond--has been a candidate for the firm's first 300-mm production site, but currently the site is on hold until the global semiconductor market full recovers from the last slump.
Kuecher said the reference DRAM was produced with a Canon Inc. 300-mm developmental lithography stepper. The Semiconductor 300 pilot line also has a separate lithography tool that Kuecher would not identify. He also would not say whether this system was also used to produce the 64-Mbit reference chip.
Industry sources believed the other exposure tool was a production beta equipment from either Canon or Nikon Corp.
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