By David Lammers and Mark LaPedus

The Global 450 Consortium, or G450C, will provide equipment suppliers with access to a test wafer bank on a “first-come, first-served basis,” depending on their in-kind investments and other contributions to the consortium, said Bob Bruck, vice president of Intel’s technology and manufacturing group (TMG).

The G450C announced this week includes five IC manufacturers – with IBM and GlobalFoundries joining the original “IST” members, Intel, Samsung, and TSMC. Those companies, along with Sematech and the SUNY-Albany College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE), will sit on a board of directors that will govern the consortium.

The G450C demonstration line in Albany is targeted for 14nm design rules early 2013 with imprint technology used for test wafer patterning of over the first year. The first 450mm 193i optical litho tool for Albany is expected to arrive in late 2013, an Intel spokesman said. After that, each of the consortium’s members can determine their own schedule for 450mm development fabs, with 2015 remaining as the group’s overall target. Intel has not decided which node capability it will want for its own development line, because that will depend upon manufacturability progress of the 450  tool set, the Intel spokesman added.

While Bruck said early analyst estimates of a $5B total cost of the 450mm test wafers needed for the transition were too high, he agreed that test wafer costs will be a “substantial portion” of the cost of the 450mm wafer development program. “That in itself is an attractive element to pull the collaborators (suppliers) in. To the degree that they participate in the consortium, they will have access to the output, to the test wafers themselves. It will be first come, first served, and the allocation schemes have to be tied to the funding of it.”

CNSE is building a new fab for the G450C effort, named Nanofab West or Nanofab X, which looms over the highway that cuts through the Albany Nanotech campus. Construction is expected to be completed next year.

Bruck said while $75 million is roughly accurate for the five IC companies contribution “as a starting point,” the overall budget will go up over time, bolstered by investments from the suppliers and a $200 million contribution over five years from the Empire State Development organization, among other sources.

Bruck said the supplier contributions “are really going to evolve and be substantial as people see the structure take place.” Suppliers will support G450C because they will be able to interface with five customers in the same place, all seeking to develop standards and product requirements. That will provide the entire industry – including the tool suppliers – with a “huge amount of cost savings.”

The 300mm wafer transition did not go well because there were 17 different semiconductor manufacturing companies interfacing with the suppliers. While common 450mm development work will be done in Albany, tool suppliers with their own development centers will continue to do their own work at home. Bruck said he envisions Intel, for example, running a “virtual fab” that would involve Albany. Intel could run test 450mm wafers through the line at Albany, then air freight those wafers to a supplier which would run them through its proprietary tool, and then back to Albany for completion and testing.

“Suppliers can say, ‘I can do this work on my own and have five customers asking for five different things. Or I can do some of this work in one location with five customers working with me on requirements, standards and product definitions. That is a big change from previous wafer transitions, and substantially increases the value of investment in this facility, in lieu of doing investments elsewhere,” he said.

The ISMI 450 program has refined a request for proposal (RFP) process that will transfer over to the G450C effort, which will take over the ISMI 450 program. Bruck lauded the assignees to the ISMI 450 program and said the five member companies will add more “high quality” people to G450C going forward.

The G450C partners have engaged in “pretty substantial dialogue” with equipment and wafer suppliers, and Bruck said he expects a “very high degree of participation in their own centers and in the development line in Albany. Some suppliers may want to do some things in front of five customers, while for other things they may prefer to do those in a more proprietary manner in their own facility.”

At a Semicon West panel discussion on the 450mm wafer transition, tool suppliers said they were vexed by the mixed messages coming from the IST companies, with different schedules and technology targets for the transition.

Bruck said the G450C is targeting 14nm capability for the Albany 2013 development line tools. Compared with the 300mm transition, he said the 450mm transition will be “much more tightly coordinated,” both because of the consortial approach to development and because of industry consolidation among the IC manufacturers.

“From a process technology node point of view, we think the suppliers will be capable of dealing with both the wafer size and the node progression in this time frame. As for when the individual companies build their own fabs, it is like the question of when EUV comes in. It depends on when it is manufacturable. We had a false start on 300mm partly because the 17 announced customers were not aligned,” he said.

Bruck added that “lithography is its own animal. We prefer to have EUV healthy before we go to 450. Either way, there will also be a need for 193i at 450, and we need EUV at 300. As we continue to gain efficiencies in our 300mm fabs, that lays the groundwork for 450. We will figure out how many layers use EUV and immersion (on 300mm wafers), and we have got to do a lot of this work in parallel” with the 450mm transition, he said.

Bruck said he will moderate a panel of suppliers that will discuss the supplier’s role in the 450mm wafer transition at the SEMI International Trade Partners Conference in Hawaii, scheduled for Nov. 3-5. While some have expected that the device makers would set up a common pool of money for equipment development, Bruck said, “It is not about who we are going to hand money out to. We can’t just throw money at the problem,” he said.

Tags: 450mm wafers, CNSE, Global 450 Consortium, Intel, semiconductor manufacturing

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