Posted on 08/27/2022 4:53:49 AM PDT by FarCenter
Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. will invest $7.5 billion to construct a new factory in the city of Tianjin, the Chinese chipmaker announced Friday, as China and the U.S. race to bolster their domestic chip supplies.
SMIC, China's largest contract chipmaker, has reached an agreement to set up a new subsidiary based in an economic development zone in Tianjin. It will have the production capacity for 100,000 12-inch wafers a month, though SMIC did not say when operations are expected to begin.
The facility will specialize in production processes of 28 nanometers or larger. U.S. authorities appear to be restricting companies there from supplying SMIC with chipmaking equipment capable of handling 10-nm or more advanced process tech, which are required for cutting-edge semiconductors.
(Excerpt) Read more at asia.nikkei.com ...
If you think Congress just flings money around like a chimp throws poop, they have nothing on the CCP. After China culled its pig raising farms because of a fast-moving disease, the CCP gave out an astonishing amount of money to people who had never raised pigs before to reestablish the population. Early results seem to indicate a fantastically poor return on investment. (The old farmers, you ask? They went out of business because their debts were not abrogated.)
28 NM chips..... we’re working with 5 NM chips and on sub 5 NM chips.
I suspect that it is cheaper to make many kinds of chips like MCUs for appliances, automotive, industrial control, internet of things, etc. at 28 nm that it is at 5 nm.
The EUV processes are expensive and will be allocated to high-performance computing, highly parallel servers, smartphone SOCs, and other applications that can make use of the billions of transistors.
Implantables?
That was probably the first fully automated wafer produced in the world - came out in the mid-1990s.
Hard to believe that a 12 inch Fab will cost $7.5 billion.
On the other hand, they probably need more than 1,000 furnaces to produce 100,000 wafers a month.
In the 1990s, it took 36 hours to grow one 12 inch wafer, and the furnace had to be cleaned and frequently out-baked before the next wafer could even be started.
12” wafers were introduced in 2002 according to wikichip.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/wafer_size
I don’t see any 450 mm fabs listed at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants
Most of TSMC’s fabs are 300 mm, including the planned Phoenix fab. Fab 18 has a capacity of 240,000 wafers a month.
Changing to 450 mm wafer diameter requires new machines from crystal pulling to wafer dicing. What are the economics, especially for EUV machines?
I am pretty sure Wacker was developing fully automated 12 inch wafers in Germany in the mid-1990s, and they arrived in their USA plants in the late 1990s.
If not, I apologize for my error and retract.
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