IC MANUFACTURING IN THE 1990s

In this paper, the costs and performance of a new wafer fab facility designed around catalog manufacturing equipment are studied. The equipment set used for the study was selected from current existing technology in order to make a "quick and dirty" assessment of costs and performance. The level of technology used was selected as being representative of readily available equipment capabilities. It was assumed that the fab is being built to manufacture a single product, a microprocessor device on a 200 mm diameter silicon wafer. The design is based on a 0.9 micron double metal CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) process and an approximate production capacity target of 80 wafer starts per day was selected.