Today I had the privilege to tour our new semiconductor fab in Austin. Since Samsung started its memory business, it has expanded capacity and announced last year to produce logic chips (microprocessor). To do so, they added a new fab and invested $3.6 billion!
Last time that I’ve been inside a fab was more than ten years ago, as manufacturers guard their production lines to avoid unnecessary contamination as well as know-how leakage.
So I felt very fortunate to tour the most advanced production facility currently in the US, bar none. Samsung produces the latest state of the art chips in its most advanced process technology.
So we walked up to the third floor to enter the new facility. The two floors below are purely for supplies – delivered from a less clean environment. It took us a good 15 min to get everybody in the group gowned up into their bunny suits. Shoe liners, hair net, hood, mask, gown, over-boots, glove liners and gloves made up our outfits, anonymizing everybody by making them look the same.
Then we entered through the air showers into a humongous production hall, that was loud, bright, mostly white and: deserted by people.
The state of the art production process actually requires very little human intervention, the wafers are handled fully automatically by a transportation system with pods that run on rails under the ceiling. They zoom from machine to machine and deliver their goods for the next process step. Technicians are only inside the fab to trouble shoot equipment, analyze failures or to load and unload the pods at the beginning or the end of the production run. Everything else happens by magic. When I walked the endless aisles of insanely expensive machinery I couldn’t help but feeling being transplanted into the middle of a strange spaceship. Wafer pods zooming by ahead at blazing speeds, a sudden warning sound and a box of wafers being dropped off at the machine from the ceiling, just 2 feet away. The belts extend, drop off the container zoom up to the pod again, and the pod disappears, only to let the machine go about its business of processing the wafers inside the container. The container and the machine dock in an air tight seal. The inside contains the truly clean air, the outside, where we walk is just seriously clean, not insanely clean. 🙂
We get to see the metal, ion implant, etching, wafer loading and finally lithography – these beasts cost multiple tens of millions of dollars per machine and there are several of them. I suddenly understand how the price of $3.6billion came to pass. Each of the pods above has the value of a top of the line family sedan.
We walk, sweat, barely hear each other over the white noise of the air conditioning system and the machines. Then suddenly the light changes from white to yellow as we enter another part of the fab. Everything is yellow, what was bright white before. This marks the border to the new part of the fab – cross contamination with the white production line is not allowed.
As we cross through the gangway into the adjacent production hall the pods zoom along above our heads to deliver the wafer material to the other building. There, an older part of the process is housed. The older generation handling robots are immediately apparent, as they drive on the ground in their own aisles. It immediately reminds me of the movie “Wally”. Two different generation of robots working in the same space side by side, but keeping out of each other’s way. Still no people! We pass by some installation crews, hovering over an opening in the floor with schematics in hand and large wires coming up from below. Everyone of them nicely bunnied up, no dirt here!
It’s like from a scene from “The Enterprise”. We continue our tour through the second part of the fab, tour the test lab facility and finish with the station that packages the wafers for shipping. We leave the fab through the changing rooms and are happy to don our outfits for more civilized clothes. Suddenly my cubicle doesn’t seem like such an outrageously small office space any more. It’s just fine with me – and quiet.
The whole experience was very stunning and impressive – though tiring, despite the only one hour length of the tour. The noise really got me!