300 mm Productivity Detractors Mitigation Cost Analysis

Driven by technology evolution, all leading-edge semiconductor manufactures have a significant wafer processing cost challenge to address over the next half dozen years. The historical means for mitigating some of the impact of this cost escalation on industry productivity trends has been to increase the wafer size diameter by 50% every decade. While the insertion date for the next wafer size transition has yet to be determined, it is highly dependent on the potential for extracting continuous improvement productivity from today's factory and integrating innovative productivity improvement in the next generation factory independent of wafer size. An advisory group of ten ISMI member companies commissioned a special study (Blue Diamond analysis) to be performed and established productivity targets (50% cycle time reduction and 30% cost reduction) to measure the effectiveness of the results. All 300 mm factory productivity detractors were considered for investigation by the ISMI Factory Simulation and Economic Analysis Focus Teams. After rigorous examination by the ISMI member companies and consultation with equipment suppliers, four major categories were selected for analysis: first wafer delay/setup time, equipment availability, small lot manufacturing, and single-wafer processing for both low and high mix business models. These factors were analyzed, simulated, and evaluated for their cycle time and cost impact on factory productivity. Scenarios were then selected to understand the boundaries of fab operating performance and were not based on any specific path or solutions. Assumptions were based on a combination of practical experiences, professional judgments, and educated guesses.