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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Proud_Infidel who wrote (52575)	9/19/2001 4:38:12 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Applied Materials plans turnkey fab preparation service By Mike Clendenin EE Times (09/19/01 13:11 p.m. EST) TAIPEI, Taiwan — Applied Materials Inc. is proposing a service that will bring fabrication facilities online, and promises to slash the time from clean room prep to first silicon at a new 300-mm wafer fab by more than 50 percent. The service, called Ramp Performance Management, is still in the pilot stage but should be used by at least one client in the United States within several months, an Applied Materials official said Tuesday (Sept. 18) at the SEMI Taiwan equipment vendors' show here. The Santa Clara, Calif., equipment manufacturer is trying to position itself between the fab owner and the various tool vendors and contractors needed to bring a new facility online, said Jean Wang, a product management executive for Applied Materials in Taiwan. The integrated approach would put Applied — not the fab owner — in logistical control of seeing a fab through to fruition after the shell is complete. "We have the framework and have tested it in-house at a small pilot line at our headquarters in the United States," Wang said. "For first wafer out, there are a lot of things that we think we can improve to shorten it to less than half the time currently needed." The best ramp time from facilities prep to first silicon is 69 days, Wang said, a record set by a Taiwanese client at a 300-mm wafer facility. Wang said Applied would coordinate the prep work in clean rooms, such as laying gas lines and installing power sources, and ensure that equipment modules are installed in the most efficient order. So far, Applied reports that one fab director in Taiwan has expressed interest in the system, but Wang would not disclose the director's employer. Applied's top customers in Taiwan are foundries Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp.; memory maker Nanya Technologies; and chip set designer and manufacturer Silicon Integrated Systems. Sticky details As it pitches the system to clients, Applied will have to overcome a few key hurdles. Among them is whether the company has the necessary experience to coordinate both the facilities and operations side of bringing a fab online. "Applied has a very good reputation with equipment, but clean room and facilities setup is a very different field of experience," said a source from one of Taiwan's major IC manufacturers. Second may be getting competing tool vendors to accept Applied's supervisory role. Vendors may fear that the company would come to know "every single detail, inside and out" of their systems, the source said. Applied's Wang said the company would use a general contractor to augment its lack of experience in facilities setup and said there shouldn't be any need for competitors to reveal sensitive information. "The connectivity [of tools] has been standardized in many ways, so we would not be infringing upon any proprietary information," she said. Competing tool vendors would not have to go through Applied for subsequent work after a fab is completed, but would work directly with the customer. Resistance expected Though Applied expects resistance from competitors, the company believes that customer demand for the outsourcing of such logistics will outweigh any backlash. "The key avenue to making this model successful is that this is really what the customer wants," Wang said. "When they are building a fab they will pull out staff from continuing operations to oversee the process. Not all of them will be experts for [fab] startups." The equipment company will form a team to specialize in fab startup operations, Wang said. It has already selected a general contractor to do facilities preparation work on a global basis. "We think companies will want to outsource this work," Wang said. "It will eliminate the wasted time and optimize the material flow. Some of the facilities will be able to be built at the same time as tool move-in, not as a traditional model in which it is done in a series and you have to wait until the facilities guys are done before you tell the tool guys to move in." Applied cannot yet offer a concrete number of days that its turnkey solution may shave off the installation time because no one has bought the service yet. The company will focus the program on 300-mm fabs, but says it could apply the methodology to new 200-mm fabs as well.