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Technology Stocks : Applied Materials No-Politics Thread (AMAT) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Big Bucks who wrote (17460)	1/25/2006 5:07:52 PM
From: Proud_Infidel	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25522

Chip makers hammer out road to 450-mm wafers Rick Merritt (01/25/2006 10:43 AM EST) SAN JOSE, Calif. — Thirteen semiconductor makers will meet behind closed doors here Friday (Jan. 27) to hammer out a road map to 450-mm wafers. Members of the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI) will take a first crack at defining 300mm-prime, a set of about 20 productivity enhancements aimed at helping today’s 300-mm fabs step gradually to next-generation wafer sizes. "The move from 200- to 300-mm wafers was a revolutionary transformation, creating the first fully automated fabs,” said Scott Kramer, director of ISMI in an interview with EE Times. "It required a very high R&D investment to make that happen. "The objective for the next generation is to make it more evolutionary,” Kramer added. “Three hundred millimeter was quite an abrupt change with many new standards. If we repeat that, we will have failed,” he added. A majority of ISMI members voted in October to create the 300-mm-prime road map. One source involved in the discussions said Intel and Samsung were the main proponents of a quick move to 450-mm wafers, while most other members opted for taking the interim step. "The majority of our companies want 300-mm-prime, but they each have their own opinions on the timing," said Kramer. ISMI members also include Advanced Micro Devices, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Infineon, Matsushita, Philips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Texas Instruments. Technology strategists will use the Friday meeting as a "direction-setting exercise to establish our focus areas for this year" for the 300mm-prime program, said Kramer. ISMI leaders bring to the meeting a tentative list of as many as 25 productivity enhancements that could be applied to current or future 300- or 450-mm fabs. They include advances in single-wafer processing, direct interfaces between wafer carriers and fab tools and other enhancements that could bolster wafer throughput. Output at today’s 300-mm fabs ranges widely from 20 wafers per hour for some CMP machines to as much as 90 wafers per hour for some scanners. Some chip makers would like to see throughput raised for all tools to rates of 120 wafers per hour. “That’s a good goal,” said Mark Liu, senior vice president of operations at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (Hsinchu, Taiwan). “We need to speed things up especially for high mix environments, but the question is whether we can do that reliably,” said Kramer. ISMI members will meet with business leaders from semiconductor equipment manufacturers for the first time in early March. The goal of that meeting is to translate the goals of the 300-mm-prime program into "economic models to estimate R&D costs and product timing," said Kramer. “As the road map becomes clear, there will be many venues for discussions between engineers in both groups of companies,” he added.