La Intella is the sweetest young lady in the known cosmos
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Intel starts push to 18-inch wafers
CHIP GIANT INTEL is leading the push towards 18-inch (450mm) fabs, EE Times reports.
Intel CEO Paul Otellini told the magazine last week that the firm is interested in shifting to the technology, although there's some resistance to the move by other semiconductor makers.
Industry consortium Sematech is already scribbling down plans for the wafers on the back of fag packets, with some optimistic that fabs using the larger size might be up and running by 2012.
But in order to do so, the whole industry, which includes the firms that make the equipment that Intel and others use, must come to some agreement.
The equation for chip manufacturers like Chipzilla is pretty simple - the larger the wafer, the more microprocessors can be printed on it. But there are technical challenges for the firms who make the purified silicon rods sliced into wafers, as well as for equipment makers and chip manufacturers.
As well as the technical challenges, there is the question of cost. The kit makers won't want to shoulder the whole of that burden, so they're probably looking at Intel with hopeful, yearning eyes. µ
Tags: Intel
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from increases in wafer size, such that there clearly must be a point where the per-chip cost-reduction fails to justify the increase in fab expenses.

On the other hand, sometimes corporations push change not because it lowers their own costs but because it inconveniences competitors.

- bill
The change from 8" to 12" did help with yields because the number of dies wasted at the curved edge went down proportionately.

With todays smaller dies and the relatively smaller portion of them ruined by the curved edge, the cost and logistics of everyone changing their machines and wafers it just doesn't pay for itself.
I've seen explnations of chip making that range from diverting rivers of riverwater to building 1/4 square mile buildings.

Bah, you expose stuff & stick it in tray. Well, PcB, at least. Yet I believe each wafer is brought up from photo masks & reduced like concave lens to sub minature.

Very sub, if you don't remember much of NM quote is dispersed vapour from metalic bead vaporized in wafers vacumn chamber, resultant coating which musta be very thin indeed is transistors active charge/state charge as ohms.

Well great, so if each chip actually does get much smaller & why not, means average work up will be for many more units & lets face it, How many people need one million desktop cpu chip?

Maybe quality is getting worth extra effort. Or Intels designs' are going more & more Telcom (Very large production needed of specific units). The AMD is Turning RED.

thomas stewart von drashek

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