TSMC opens Tainan fab, plus 300-mm pilot line

TSMC opens Tainan fab, plus 300-mm pilot line
By the SBN news staff, Semiconductor Business News
March 30, 2000 (3:26 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20000330S0024

TAINAN, Taiwan — In a ceremony that included a traditional Chinese dragon dance, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. today officially opened TSMC Fab 6, which the company calls the world's largest semiconductor production facility.

The 8-inch wafer production facility will feature 0.25- to 0.10-micron CMOS processing technology and is expected to produce 32,000 wafer starts per month by the end of 2000, bringing the company nearer its stated goal of producing 3.4 million wafers this year. Fab 6's output is expected to further increase to over 50,000 eight-inch wafer starts per month by the end of 2001.

In addition, the fab will be outfitted with the company's first 300-mm (12-inch) pilot line and one of TSMC's four copper production lines. Equipment installation is scheduled for later this year. TSMC expects the pilot line capacity to be 4,500 wafers per month. The processes developed on the pilot line, and the experience gained from eva luating 300-mm tools and manufacturing systems, will later be transferred to TSMC's first full-production 300-mm facility, dubbed Fab 12.

"The grand opening of Fab 6 is a remarkable achievement on a variety of fronts," said F.C. Tseng, president of TSMC. "It's the largest semiconductor fab ever built and is the first foundry in the Tainan Science Industrial Park. It also features the highest-yielding 8-inch pilot line in our company's history"

Groundbreaking for TSMC Fab 6 began in July 1998. The facility successfully completed pilot wafers in December 1999 and its first production wafers in January.

The manufacturing area of the cleanroom alone is 190,000 sq. ft., about the size of four football fields. When fully loaded and staffed in 2001, Fab 6 will contain nearly 1,000 sets of manufacturing tools and will employ 2,000 production and engineering personnel, as well as a support staff of 320.

The facility will feature state-of-the-art-manufacturing capabilities, including all-scanner lithog raphy for quick exposure of large, extremely fine-grained reticles. In addition, Fab 6 will use leading-edge manufacturing techniques such as shallow trench isolation, titanium/cobalt silicide technology, chemical mechanical polishing, low-k dielectrics and copper interconnects.

G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc. (San Jose, Calif.), a semiconductor research company, said, "The opening of Fab 6 is a clear statement of TSMC's commitment to delivering on its promise of providing industry leading foundry capacity, In addition, the fab will serve as a major production site for TSMC's new technologies, its copper-based manufacturing capability, and its 300-mm pilot project."