Process geometries below 80nm dominate fab capacity

Wafer Fabs

Process geometries below 80nm dominate fab capacity

South Korea, Taiwan, and the Americas feature highest concentration of leading-edge capacity

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

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USA: More than one-fourth (29 percent) of all wafer capacity is for devices having geometries or feature sizes smaller than 80nm according to IC Insights' recently published Global Wafer Capacity Analysis and Forecast.

Such devices include high-density DRAM and flash memory devices that are based on 70nm, 60nm, 50nm, and 40nm technologies and high-performance MPU/MCU/DSP devices and advanced ASIC/ASSP/FPGA devices based on 65nm and 45nm technologies.

The report splits process geometries into eight categories. The findings show that 15 percent of global wafer capacity is based on <0.12µ - ≥80nm processes and 13 percent is based on <0.16µ - ≥0.12µ technologies. The least common technologies, at least in terms of the share of total installed capacity, are between the geometries of 0.2µ and 0.7µ, essentially the 0.25µ, 0.35µ, 0.5µ and 0.65µ generations.

It is also interesting to see that the >0.7µ category maintains a relatively large share of total capacity, even though it has been more than a decade-and-a half since 0.8µ process technology was considered leading-edge. The main reason is huge quantities of commodity-type devices, such as standard analog and general-purpose logic, are manufactured with well-established process technologies having larger than 0.7µ feature sizes. Additionally, high-voltage IC products require large-geometries process technologies.

Data from the report also show that South Korea, Taiwan, and the Americas are more leading-edge focused than other regions or countries, and that Europe has the highest concentration of “old” technologies with feature sizes greater than 0.4µ. Given its emphasis on high-density DRAM and flash memory products, South Korea has the largest share of wafer capacity dedicated to leading-edge processes (45 percent). The Americas region is next in line with 37 percent of its capacity using the most advanced processes, followed by Taiwan with 32 percent.

Fig. 1; Source: IC Insights, USA