Advanced R&D to volume production in 300 mm

The semiconductor industry is seeing a rapid increase in wafer fab requirements due to fast evolution of processes towards the 0.1 /spl mu/m technology node. Over the past few years, STMicroelectronics has developed the flexible pilot line concept, combining R&D constraints and manufacturing requirements to accelerate the transfer of basic processes to industrial technologies. The flexible fab concept has been tested at the 0.5/0.25 /spl mu/m level for nonvolatile memories and ASIC products and is being repeated for the 0.18/0.1 /spl mu/m generations. A fast transition from research to manufacturing, and reduced development time and manufacturing ramp up becomes more challenging with increasing process complexity, performance requirements and cost constraints. At present, discussions are taking place worldwide about the relative advantages of 300 mm wafer conversion and how to specify new fabs in an economical way. Other active debates are related to shrinkage strategies and how to sustain high R&D costs induced by acceleration towards small geometries. This paper describes the needs for a flexible 300 mm fab aimed for production of ASIC products. We analyse how 200 mm experience gained with advanced CMOS technologies can be extended to new CMOS process generations.