Adaptable IC manufacturing systems for the 21st century

Abstract The semiconductor industry is currently facing a number of challenges. The capital costs of IC factories and the cost of developing technology are increasing at a faster rate than the revenues. In addition, demand for ICs is fragmenting into lower volume and more differentiated markets. The current chip manufacturing approach is establishing megafactories for show mass production of commodity products. To remain competitive alternative design and manufacturing techniques will have to be developed with flexible factories for rapid production of multiple products in different technologies. At stanford University we have built a large interdisciplinary program aimed at exploring radically different semiconductor manufactoring opportunities. The approach is to build a highly flexible computer controlled manufacturing facility - the Programmable Factory and in parallel with this factory, a suite of simulation tools the Virtual Factory which emulate all functions of the real factory. Economic modeling suggests that such approach may offer more economical small or large scale production, higher flexibility to accommodate many products on several processes, and faster tumaround to hasten product innovation.