Not long after Tom Caulfield, general manager of Globalfoundries’ Fab 8 — the largest silicon foundry in the United States — came into the conference room and sat down, he looked over at me and said, “You have a tick crawling on your shoulder.”
He made as if to do something about it, but Jason Gorss, the company’s PR manager and a giant of man, was closer at hand. He leaped up, grabbed a tissue from a nearby table, snagged the pesky arachnid, and disposed of it.
“Spotting defects is what I do,” Caulfield continued, unperturbed.
That’s certainly one way of putting it. Another way is to say that, as general manager, he is responsible for the quality of output in one of the most advanced chip manufacturing facilities in the United States. Chips are made in batches on wafers, which are about a foot in diameter, and each wafer is like an unbelievably complicated cake that needs to be mixed and baked just right in order to maximize the number of working chips on it. Any little bug in the batter, and one or more chips won’t fire up. And some of those chips sell for hundreds of dollars apiece.
Corridors like this in Fab 8 are faced by billions of dollars' worth of semiconductor manufacturing... [+]
The tick came from an informal part of the plant tour, when a hard-hat worker named Ty drove us in a rugged construction vehicle into an area that used to be used by the federal government for rocket-fuel research. Among the weeds and shrubs now growing over everything, we saw half-buried bunkers with thick steel doors, gantries for holding burning rockets in place to see how much thrust they have, and 10-ton-capable cranes in small enclosed spaces. Wernher von Braun ran a team here after the United States poached him from the Nazis at the end of World War II. At the bottom of various stairways into the earth and under manhole covers in the middle of overgrown fields, concrete plugs hide whatever is buried there. Ticks wait on branch tips for the hapless passerby.
The first time I saw Fab 8, located in Saratoga County, New York, was when then-Governor David Paterson and former Governor George Pateki spaded a couple of symbolic shovels-full of dirt in the Luther Forest to break ground on July 24, 2009.
The second time I paid a visit, about a year later, I had a chance to stand on a 210,000-square-foot slab of concrete that would one day be manufacturing space. Other than a few 10-foot-diameter ventilation pipes laying around on the third floor waiting to be fitted, there wasn’t much else in that cement cathedral.
Last week, I got to see the entire original space enclosed and full of pricey machines — for epitaxy, deposition, etching, lithography, diffusion, implantation, and other processes — that perform sometimes hundreds of precision steps on wafers, small groups of which travel around together in Front Opening Unified Pods (FOUPs) on an overhead rail system that could come out of any science fiction movie. There are even upside-down switching yard/rail depots, where the FOUPs can hang out like bats sleeping in a cave, latched onto the ceiling so as to keep inventory-in-process off the valuable floor space. Some of the more impressive machines, supplied by companies like
This factory — when yet more capacity is brought on line in the form of 90,000 square feet of adjacent space (where silicon qualification has already begun) and when some of a 200,000-square-foot space nearby that was going to be dedicated entirely to R&D is converted to production — will eventually be able to crank out 60,000 wafers per month.
Everything about this place is gigantic, from the fields of supply tanks full of different gases out back to the network of pipes that carry them into the plant. The clean space itself is the size of six football fields. In a parking lot nearby is an area employees refer to informally as Trailer City, where hundreds of contractors’ trucks sit when not otherwise occupied. Investment in Fab 8 — underwritten primarily by Mubadala Development Corporation, an arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi — is $10 billion and climbing. Construction is carried out by 20,000 workers, and the plant itself employs 3,000 people (in a business where, when you look down one of the long corridors in the clean room, you may see one or two people in bunny suits). And those $100 million photolithography machines? Fab 8 has dozens of them. At one point, while in full bunny regalia, I saw a half billion dollars of value sitting in a line about 40 feet long.
The author suited up to go into the clean room — for others, it’s all in a day's work
All this production is part of Globalfoundries’ program to build a worldwide manufacturing base large enough to justify its owners’ gargantuan investment. Included in this armada of assets are
Part of Caulfield’s mandate is to fill and optimize these fabs. He believes that the demand for microprocessor chips of all types is there, what with the increase in data traffic driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), high-mobility devices like smartphones and tablets, and the build-out of computing infrastructure to accommodate all this traffic. And the group of manufacturers that can afford to build plants to supply microprocessors is only shrinking. The upfront investment is just too high. “It’s a big investment, and it never stops,” said Caulfield. Thus, it’s down to Globalfoundries, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Samsung, and
The scale Caulfield is hoping to reach is based on TSMC, which claims to have a current annual capacity of 16.4 million eight-inch equivalent wafers. Globalfoundries doesn’t have to get that big, but it has to be somewhere in the ballpark. The IBM assets will definitely help. Not only does the deal come with two good fabs, a skilled workforce, and a decent customer base, but also outright ownership of ~10,000 patents. These last will help Globalfoundries in any cross-licensing agreements into which it may have to enter.
With respect to the IBM assets, Caulfield asserts that there is more demand than capacity for parts made in both Vermont and New York. He expects to increase revenue two ways: invest in the pinch points constricting production and moving some production elsewhere (likely Fab 8, which still has capacity coming online). The idea is that the fixed R&D and SG&A expenses of these plants can be spread over a larger revenue base, and they can make money for Globalfoundries even though they were unprofitable for IBM. So, Caulfield expects to keep the current IBM employees where they are, crank up the factories, and add production elsewhere. Given current losses at those plants and the $1.5 billion in cash that IBM transferred along with the hard assets, Globalfoundries has several years of running room to turn them around.
Currently, the generation of chips being used by most Globalfoundries customers has features 28nm wide. Although 20nm is theoretically next, Caulfield says it won’t be a high-volume node. 20nm requires a second pass to lay on circuits (adding expense), but does not have 3D (FinFET) features, which competitor Intel already has on its 22nm parts. Recently, Globalfoundries abandoned its own design for 14nm and entered into an alliance with Samsung to make use of Samsung’s 3D technology. The 14nm parts will issue from one Globalfoundries fab and three Samsung fabs for customers worldwide. Caulfield expects 14nm to be big.
Globalfoundries is still an alternative supplier for many of its customers, playing second fiddle to TSMC. Naturally, it has aspirations to turn the tables. And it may have a chance at 10nm, the last node to which the industry can see a clear, if difficult, path. When it entered into the agreement to acquire IBM’s fabs in the Northeast, Globalfoundries acquired the technology that will get it to 10nm.
At the moment, the company is involved in a project that has produced “integrated 10nm flow” at the Albany Nanotech Institute, which is run by IBM and funded by the large equipment suppliers. Soon, Caulfield said, the company will have that same 10nm flow — which involves almost 1,000 process steps — at Fab 8.
