Economics of 450mm wafer transition

USA: Many people in the industry seem to think that moving to larger wafers is the obvious next step to keep on Moore’s Law and to ensure that the cost per transistor continues to decline as it has in the past. It’s a reasonable assumption, since such a move is on the ITRS roadmap.

But before making such a change, and before investing some tens of billions of dollars to make a change, it’s prudent to do a careful analysis of the facts and the myths around such a transition. SEMI’s Equipment Productivity Working Group (the EPWG) has done such an analysis.

Their conclusions are several:

* The semiconductor business today, and for the foreseeable future, is consumer-driven, and needs to be capable of handling short-run, rapid-change products with very short cycle times to accommodate the lifecycle of the products now sold in the market.

* The research and development dollars for shrinks, new processes, and new materials are highly constrained, and must be invested where they will offer a demonstrable positive return. Somewhat surprisingly, the change to a larger wafer size in itself does not lead to significantly reduced costs. Intel saw this in the changeover from 150mm to 200mm, and the same will be true for a change from 300mm to 450mm.

* The true driver of the overall reduced cost for 300mm wafers was the use of factory automation (that is, advanced materials handling systems, or AMHS), advanced process control systems (APC), mini-environments (FOUPs), and stopping work on 200mm node advancement.

Shrinks, new materials, and new processes will continue to advance the industry on Moore’s Law, but there are simply not enough R&D resources available to continue such advancement in nodes and processes AND to work on a 450mm wafer size transition.