By David Lammers

I spent a morning recently at a community college near the GlobalFoundries fab in upstate New York, and learned a lot about the challenges facing students and educators.

Fred Strnisa, instructor, semiconductor and nanotechnology

Fred Strnisa, who teaches semiconductor manufacturing technology (SMT) at the Hudson Valley Community College’s Malta campus, has a mix of students. Of the 13 people in the SMT sequence, only two are recent high school graduates, and four are over 40.

“A lot of the people who come here are in their late 20s and 30s,” said Strnisa. “They are trying to reinvent themselves,” hoping to move on to what they believe will be better careers as operators and technicians at the Malta fab, or at one of the General Electric facilities in the Albany-Schenectady-Troy- area.

With fellow SMT teacher Abe Michelin, Strnisa says his job “is to make my students valuable to employers in the area,” including GlobalFoundries, GE, and the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) and Sematech research complex in Albany, 20 miles to the south. He plans to increase the number of students in the two-year sequence, providing funding materializes.

The coursework is demanding, including hands-on labs aimed at making working diodes. And almost all of the students have jobs. “One student is the manager at the Advanced Auto Parts store here,” Strnisa said, concerned that some his students might have too much on their young shoulders.

Brett Miller stopped by Strnisa’s lab, and volunteered that of the original 15 who started the two-year SMT sequence with him, only six made it through. “Nine of them couldn’t handle it. Usually it is the older students who take it more seriously,” said Miller, who was laid off after a long stint at a book marketing company in the area. He graduated from the SMT program last May, and is hoping to get a job at GlobalFoundries.

“The economy totally tanked here during the downturn, but I saw more high tech companies coming to the area, so I decided to reeducate myself with the SMT program,” he said, estimating that he spent 70-75 hours a week at the classes or studying on his own. He could do that because he qualified for unemployment insurance and supplemental “599B” money to support his retraining effort.

GlobalFoundries has about 1,300 people on board now, and will hire about 300 more by the end of this year when volume production begins. “I’ve been waiting to be hired, to hear back from the hiring manager,” Miller said. “Eventually, I’d like to be in management, but a technician’s job would be a great start.”

Miller said the labs in the SMT program helped him to understand the chip-making process. “When a lab goes wrong, we learn how to fix it,” Miller said, exuding enthusiasm.

Penny Hill, an associate dean at the college’s Tec-Smart program (Training and Education Center for Semiconductor Manufacturing and Alternative and Renewable Technologies), said the SMT program “is pretty difficult for young kids right out of high school. The requirements are challenging, and oftentimes at their ages they aren’t quite sure what they want to do. And then there often are money issues,” she said.

The HVCC’s Tec-Smart program, located not far from the Malta fab, opened in January 2010. It is a gorgeous place, with a church-like peaked ceiling and huge windows, set amidst a nearly pristine forest. Wind turbines and two large solar panels are outside. Geothermal, HVAC, and solar energy programs complement the SMT sequence, partly supported by a Department of Energy grant.

On a sunny and cool spring morning, it seemed like an idyllic place to be. However, there are several challenges facing the school’s industrial technology programs, said Andrew Matonak, president of the Hudson Valley Community College, based in Troy, N.Y. It costs at least 50 percent more to educate a student in industrial skills or health sciences, compared with a liberal arts program. He estimates a $19,000 cost for an industrial sequence, such as one aimed at teaching students the electrical and mechanical skills needed to repair sophisticated machinery. That falls far short of $3,400 in tuition.

Compared with three years ago, New York state funding is 21 percent less. “The state keeps pushing the funding requirements down to the counties, but these health sciences and industrial technology programs are costing more.”  The equipment in the SMT lab costs about $500,000, Strnisa estimated, and adding more students requires buying more workstations and tools.

Phil White, dean of the schools of business and engineering & technical technologies, adds that people are still getting to know what GlobalFoundries is all about, and vice versa. The curriculum in the SMT program is being adjusted, based on discussions with GlobalFoundries people.

Students, Matonak and White said, are discussing among themselves the semiconductor industry’s corporate culture, including what it might be like to wear a bunny suit for 12-hour shifts. “For some students, who like socializing, working in a cleanroom environment might be a challenge,” White said.

Penny Hill, associate dean, and Fred Strnisa, outside the HVCC Malta building.

By David Lammers

The quality of life has improved at the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 here in upstate New York. Sure, people here are breathing easier now that yields are up at the company’s fab in Dresden, Germany, and winter has turned to a luscious spring here at Malta, located north of Albany.

The gut-level joy comes because the fab’s new cafeteria opened on Monday, April 16. I arrived the next day to do some interviews about how the fab is staffing up, getting ready for volume production later this year.

When time came for lunch, we made our way down to the spanking-new cafeteria. I saw a sign for sushi, and went over there, thinking there might be some plastic packages of pre-made sushi, the kind you can pick up at the grocery store when you are in a hurry.

Instead, there was a real Japanese sushi chef at work, knife in hand, who began making the two rolls I ordered. Two other customers soon arrived, as I heard a Japanese man and woman behind me speaking in anticipation about the various kinds of sushi available. They were in the fab to install equipment, and had discovered a little island of gastronomic home.

The GlobalFoundries fab, like most semiconductor operations, is an international place, with people from 30 countries among the 1,300 (and growing) employees. Judging by the visitor’s log in the lobby, there is a steady stream of visiting contractors who hail from abroad. Half of the GlobalFoundries employees come from outside the area.

These workers from abroad have raised the standards for the Fab 8 cafeteria, said Angelo Mazzone, the CEO of a company which runs five cafeterias and six restaurants in the area. “We have a lot of people here from Singapore and Dresden, and these people from overseas know so much about food,” Mazzone said.

Each food station has a bona fide chef, and there is a full-time coffee barista who offers drinks made from beans sourced from around the world. “The people from Dresden like real strong coffee,” Mazzone noted.

Angelo Mazzone (left) with good customer Travis Bullard at the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 cafeteria.

One of his challenges was to develop a base of suppliers able to supply the variety of foods offered at the cafeteria. One objective is to offer a complete meal for $6, but most people spend between $7 and $10 on lunch.

Travis Bullard, who handles corporate public relations at the Malta site, said GlobalFoundries is part of a bigger trend among high-tech companies offering good food to their workers. Before coming to Malta, Bullard worked in Austin at the new Longhorn campus of AMD, and he said his former employer also has a deluxe cafeteria. Google and Apple apparently are at the forefront of a trend to offer healthy food, either for free or for very low prices.

At Malta, the goal is for the cafeteria to pay for itself, Mazzone said. Right now, the cafeteria is open from 5:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. “It may be open 24/7 at some point, but that comes at a big cost,” he noted. The fab is in the midst of a beautiful forest, well away from any restaurants. A round-the-clock food supply will be a necessity once volume production begins later this year.

GlobalFoundries is ahead of schedule on its hiring plans, Bullard said, and expects to have 1,600 working at the fab in a few months, up from 1,300 now. Before the cafeteria opened, there were more than a thousand construction workers who were fed well from a big tent at the construction site. Mazzone converted a shipping container, the kind which moves cargo on ships, into an outdoor kitchen to supply the fab builders with cooked food. That worked well, but food brought in can’t compete with a real kitchen.

Bullard said the cafeteria is a place where the workers can come together and talk. “People bump into each other in the cafeteria and start talking about things they are working on. We never had that before this place opened. It’s an intangible benefit.”

An army marches on its stomach, and foundries are no different. Packing a lunch day after day can be a drag, and so it is no wonder that the GlobalFoundries workers were smiling broadly last week. The sushi is excellent.

By David Lammers

Sometimes, you have to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Everyone has heard about the claims of improved 32nm yields at the GlobalFoundries Dresden fab. At the Common Platform Technology Forum, details emerged about how the GlobalFoundries team boosted  yields so dramatically.

Mike Noonen, hired away in January from NXP Semiconductors as the sales and marketing senior vice president at GlobalFoundries, started out the Common Platform event by acknowledging that in the third quarter of last year, low yields were “challenging” the volume production of AMD’s Llano processor.

Mike Noonen

“We took a variety of steps in the fab and on the management team,” Noonen said at the Santa Clara event Wednesday (March 14). “The result was that Llano yields doubled in a quarter. We are in a very, very aggressive ramp of Llano,” he told more than a thousand attendees.

Noonen said the foundry achieved an 80% increase in 32nm unit shipments from Q3 to Q4.

How did GlobalFoundries’s Dresden yields improve in such a short time?

An executive gave credit to the “great German engineers” at Dresden, with a key boost from Robert Madge, director of design-enabled manufacturing at GlobalFoundries, who was sent over to Dresden early last year to help fix the yield issues.

Rutger Wijburg, hired last August to run the Dresden campus after working at NXP’s foundry operations, brought an intense focus on yield improvements, this source said. Rather than try to accommodate a dozen new foundry products at the same time — which “sent the Dresden operation into shock, hurting everything” — Wijburg preached “Llano, Llano, Llano” to the Dresden team. “German engineering did the rest,” the executive said.

Single-wafer clean tools from Dai Nippon Screen (DNS) were used much more widely, a key factor in the yield-enhancement campaign. “Getting the particles off the wafers with single-wafer cleans was one of the main things they figured out. We also bought a bunch of brightfield inspection tools. And there were some back-end copper issues that got figured out,” he said.

With 32nm SOI yields now at very respectable levels, “AMD is happy again,” the executive said, with the relationship back on a normal customer-supplier basis. If GlobalFoundries can deliver the goods, they will keep AMD’s business, even in the face of competition from TSMC at 28nm bulk and 28nm HKMG.

AMD has its “Trinity” processor coming along this year, and the expectations are for AMD to account for about $1.5B in business for GlobalFoundries this year, up from $800 million in 2011. JoAnne Feeney, a stock analyst at Longbow Research, said AMD has been gaining market share, with a 17 percent share of the notebook processor market.

Feeney said notebook customers pay a lot of attention to battery life, and the AMD notebook processors are equivalent to what Intel-based systems deliver. Consumers don’t know or care if the processor is 32nm SOI or 22nm Tri-gate, she added, as long as the performance, graphics, and, especially, battery life are competitive.

The AMD-based thin notebooks — which Intel has branded as UltraBooks – may be significantly cheaper than the Intel-based UltraBooks, Feeney added. While Intel has outlined specific guidelines for what UltraBooks must be able to do, thereby jacking up the costs, the AMD customers have a relatively free rein and may be able to undercut the UltraBook retail prices by a couple hundred of dollars, she said.

“I am predicting that AMD will gain share this year,” Feeney said at the Common Platform event.

Another interesting point was raised by a senior marketing manager working at GlobalFoundries. While a year ago some major smartphone IC manufacturers were saying they would mainly use a non-high-k gate stack for 28nm applications processors, the advantages of  high-k are now swinging more of their product mix toward a high-k solution. The nitrided polySi gate oxide just can’t keep up in terms of power and performance with the more-complex high-k gate stack. And with mass production of 28nm parts slipping somewhat, customers are tilting toward high-k at 28nm and pushing back tapeouts of 20nm parts by three or four quarters, he added.

With several hundred thousand wafer starts of 32nm high-k/metal gate production behind it for Llano production, the company’s painful yield enhancement process will pay dividends at 28nm HKMG, he said.

Another executive at the Common Platform Forum claimed that through all of the foundry’s 2011 challenges, GlobalFoundries customers have been willing to cut the foundry some slack, largely because they don’t want to be totally dependent on TSMC and thereby vulnerable to wafer price increases as 28nm heads into mass production.

By David Lammers

This year, 2012, is a “Year of the Dragon” in the Asian zodiac calendar, yet another reason for Samsung Electronics to build a third semiconductor fab in Austin, Texas.

There are 12 animals in the Zodiac menagerie. People born in the Dragon years have assertive personalities, bringing vitality and confidence to their business pursuits. That “Dragon personality” seems to characterize Samsung, which has invested in the semiconductor industry’s down cycles with great success.

All signs point to the need for another Samsung logic fab in the United States. Samsung saw a 73 percent rise in its smartphone/tablet business in the most recent quarter, and the company racked up more than $5 billion in quarterly profits. To meet demand for Apple’s foundry needs and Samsung’s own internal SoC consumption, a new logic fab will be needed.

Ana Hunter

Add to that Samsung’s long-range plan to make foundry equivalent to its memory business. Ana Hunter, the vice president of Samsung’s foundry business, was in Austin recently for a Global Semiconductor Association (GSA) event, and she outlined how important leading-edge foundry is to Samsung’s strategy. Samsung and GlobalFoundries have cooperated on developing a 28nm process aimed at smartphones and tablets, she said, adding that the two foundries “will cooperate on second sourcing and technology and will compete for business.”

Samsung has a 330-acre site in north Austin, with the logic-oriented Main Fab (earlier called Fab 2 or S2) reaching high yields soon after completion of the $3.6 billion expansion project. C. J. Muse, an analyst with Barclay’s Capital, predicts that Samsung will need to add ~43,000 wafers a month of 32nm capacity in 2012 to support Apple’s A6 production and internal Samsung application processor demand. To meet that need, Samsung’s LSI operation will nearly double its logic-oriented investment to about $7 billion this year, exceeding Samsung’s memory-related investments, Muse said.

Christian Gregor Dieseldorff, a research director at SEMI, said Samsung has “allocated much more spending for System LSI/Foundry-business, more than ever seen before.” Samsung will increase its installed capacity for System LSI and foundry by more than 30 percent in 2012, from ~530,000 wafers per month (in 200 mm equivalents) at end of 2011 to ~700,000 by the end of this year.

Sure, there are issues which need to be worked out in central Texas. Travis County and Samsung are trying to reach agreement on the tax valuation of the Samsung property and production equipment, a dispute which one would hope will not turn out to be a showstopper. Earlier, Austin’s electric grid was a concern, but Austin Energy added the needed substations.

Probably the biggest challenge is the talent pool. Samsung competes with Intel and the other big chipmakers for experienced technicians and manufacturing engineers, some of whom are more comfortable working for a U.S. company with schedules that are less aggressive than Samsung’s deployment expectations. Unfortunately, Texas schools are not very well funded, and are not turning out enough people who want to learn to maintain an etcher or boost fab productivity.

Recent global events also lean in favor of a new Austin fab. The leadership change in North Korea could easily provoke military conflicts that could impact Samsung’s Kihung fab complex, not far from Seoul. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan is fresh in everyone’s memory, or should be.

There is a new realization that putting all of one’s chips (or disk drives) in one geographical locale is just not smart business. Apple, for all of its legal issues with Samsung’s system designs, needs to source chips from at least one fab complex not in a military or seismic danger zone.

I’ll close with an anecdote garnered when three friends of mine and I gathered at a restaurant in Austin for a holiday burgers-and-beers lunch. “What kind of laptop should I buy after I turn in my company system?” said Greg, who is retiring in March after 40 years of managing J.C. Penney stores. “Oh, I wouldn’t get a laptop,” said Garry, a software engineer, arguing that a new iPad tablet would be able to do everything Greg needs to do. I sat back and thought how ludicrous that would have sounded just two years ago, but how much sense it makes in the Year of the Dragon.

It all adds up to the need for a new logic fab in Austin, opening in mid-2013.

By David Lammers

In 2006, I had an interesting interview with Jim Doran about cultural diversity and chip manufacturing. Doran, who held manufacturing executive positions during a long career at Intel, AMD, Spansion, and finally GlobalFoundries, made several points that bear a brief retelling:

“This industry is an interesting mix of business, science and people,” Doran noted. “We all deal with electrons that move around in the same way, but there is a huge difference in how companies get value out of their asset base — company to company,” he said, detailing several methods he found useful to bring out the best in people from different cultures.

For example: Spansion, where Doran worked at the time of the 2006 interview, needed to come up with common metrics to measure productivity at its fabs in Austin and northeastern Japan, such as line yield, cycle times, and labor productivity.

I asked Doran if Japanese engineers, imbued with a pride in things Made in Japan, were “stubborn.”

Doran replied that “it often does take a longer time to get our Japanese colleagues to accept a new or radical idea. Any culture has pride and wants to be successful, and wants to build on that success. So yes, their first choice tends to be resistance. The other side of that is, once you do get an idea accepted, there is going to be a march-to-the-goal-line kind of thing, in a very dedicated way. You have to spend more time up front building consensus in Japan, but once you do, by my observation, then you just have to get out of the way.”

Doran’s answers were accurate, insightful, and extremely credible, given his experience building and managing fabs around the world.

GlobalFoundries is not the only multi-cultural company in the semiconductor industry, of course, but it may be unique in that among its 11,000 employees it has an almost equal-parts mix of Americans (which involves several dozen different nationalities, for example, currently working at the Malta, N.Y. Fab 8), Germans at the Dresden Fab 1 complex, and the Singaporeans with their hard-won foundry management experience. And now we can add people from Abu Dhabi and the Middle East, with a likelihood that the eventual Abu Dhabi fab will be staffed with hundreds of engineers from India and the other nations in the sub-continent.

What other company is so decidedly multi-cultural in its ownership, management, and overall workforce?

At the GlobalFoundries technology event in Santa Clara, the multi-cultural theme kept popping up. Because managers from the former Chartered had experience running multi-product fabs, a team of ex-Chartered managers transferred to Dresden to infuse the multi-product culture into the German engineers there.

Rutger Wijburg

The senior executive at Dresden currently is Kay Chai Ang, in charge of 300mm fab operations at GlobalFoundries. GlobalFoundries recently hired an ex-NXP fab manager, Rutger Wijburg, as the new general manager of  the Dresden operation. Wijburg, a Dutchman who speaks several European languagues fluently, will report to Ang. Interim CEO Ajit Manocha said he is spending much of his time in Dresden to manage the ramp there.

The mix of cultures is bound to be a long-term positive for GlobalFoundries. It should not be overlooked that Singapore itself is a multi-cultural society, with the dominant Chinese co-existing profitably with Western expats, a large infusion of Malaysians who provide much of the fab labor, and people of Indian heritage.

The German workers bring a dedication to quality. Just as Germany’s car industry has done well at the high-performance end of Audi, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes Benz, Germany’s semiconductor engineers bring a similar devotion to engineering excellence. For GlobalFoundries Dresden, that was expressed in the manufacture of AMD’s microprocessors, a high-performance product line.

The question facing the Dresden work force is whether it can increase its flexibility, ranging from the ability to make multiple and lower-cost products to an ability to work well with non-German engineers who might have a different view of how problems can be solved.

For the Singaporeans, creativity is a challenge. In Confucian cultures such as China and Japan, the social hierarchy is important. Coming up with new and innovative solutions to chip manufacturing challenges perhaps doesn’t come quite as naturally to the Singaporeans as it needs to.

Since I know very little about Abu Dhabi or the people there, I had best refrain from saying anything about the subject.

The cultural diversity of GlobalFoundries is its greatest asset. Developing an openness to the unique characteristics shared by people from other cultures is something that doesn’t come naturally to all problem solvers. But it must be a top priority for this global foundry as it searches for a new CEO.