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AMD Hardware

AMD Breaks Ground on New Chip Facility 189

Posted by CowboyNeal from the brand-new-digs dept.
philthedrill writes "AMD announced that they have broken ground on Fab 36, which again will be located in Dresden, Germany. The 300 mm fab is expected to start volume production in 2006. There's more information at CBS MarketWatch." AMD will be moving from its current 200 mm wafer process, and looking to save money through the higher efficiency of the new process, as well as keep up with expected demand for their next generation processors. The MarketWatch article also contains some speculation about probable partners for AMD.
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AMD Breaks Ground on New Chip Facility More

AMD Breaks Ground on New Chip Facility

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  • size (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:31AM (#7526931)
    Why don't they skip to 10 foot wafers?
    • The better question is, why dont they switch to SQUARE WAFERS! Take a look at any of Tom's articles on new AMD cores and you'll see like 20% wasted space.

      oh, and 10ft? Pfft, look at laserdisc, people want small ;)

      • Why don't they skip to 10 foot wafers?

        I know you're all joking, but I've actually been asked this sort of question a few times during my days when I did work in a fab. I started of on 6" wafers until we converted to 8" (200 mm) wafers. One of the challenges was film uniformity for deposition processes. Slight variations in film thickness can result in varying yields.

        The other problem with 8" wafers was that they were a lot more sensitive to stress. Without going into too much detail, we'd have spare/s

  • Cost of labor (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ziggyboy ( 232080 )
    Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to put facilities that mass produce chips in countries where labor is cheap? Most Intel chips I've seen are marked "Made in Malaysia" or "Made in the Philippines."

    • Re:Cost of labor (Score:5, Informative)

      by stetsds ( 567259 ) * on Friday November 21, 2003 @04:49AM (#7526981)
      In an interview one of the AMD managers said that worker skill was more important than cost in this case. AMD already has a chip fab in Dresden, employing about 2000.

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Barbarian ( 9467 )
        I for one am happy to see AMD expanding in a first world country, and employing first world workers, against the trend of sending everything overseas, or of shipping in cut-rate employees from the third world.

        • Uhh, buh? Unless you're from Germany, what possible logical sense does that make?

          If you're from Germany, then sure - it's great. But if you're from the US then it makes no difference if the job's in Germany or Timbuktu, it's not in the US.

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:2, Informative)

        by Plammox ( 717738 )
        AMD also has factories in Malaysia. It's not the wafer fabs, it's where they assemble the CPUs. Same thing goes for Intel.
        • Yeah, but the AMD factory next door to me in Thailand (the wall is within 50m of my window) just changed hands / names / was sold / who knows. Just noticed a sign announcing the change about two weeks ago. Maybe that'll stop some of the black soot covering everything in my house. Oh, wait, this is BKK, so someone else will step up and help out the pollution level.
    • It might be cheaper, but poor quality control tends to go hand in hand with cheap labor.

    • Re:Cost of labor (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LarsWestergren ( 9033 )
      From what I have read, for AMD the choice was between a fab in the US, and in Dresden. I think they picked former East Germany because the previous factory doing well, of the high number of skilled workers who are willing to work for relatively low wages, and the Euro starting to make Europe a more attractive place to do business. So again tech jobs are moving to eastwards, but not quite as far this time. Why they didn't go the Malaysia or Philippines as you mentioned I don't know. Perhaps the current unres

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:2, Informative)

        by romanm ( 178782 )
        Cost of labor is not the only factor here. By making the company in the Germany the chip becomes an European Union product and is less taxed than the Asian imported chip.

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:4, Insightful)

        by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @05:20AM (#7527048) Journal
        I doubt they built a fab plant in Germany to keep down labour costs.

        As an EU nation, Germany has employment rights that are a lot more stringent than in the US or South East Asia - we're talking about a higher minimum wage, a cap on weekly working hours, sick pay, maternity and paternity leave, pension contributions by the employer, favourable redundancy payments, etc.

        More likely is that other economic factors - tax breaks, being inside the Euro zone, etc - were the deciding factors.
        • There is still a large wage differential between the former DDR lander (states) and the rest. Dresden has not only been in the chip business (Infineon is also there), it has also been the home to some high precision instrument manufacture and research centres.

          There is also an international school there which is a prerequisite to bringing over non-german execs with families. I don't work there myself but a friend has moved there and quite enjoys it. It may cost more than SE Asia, but there are other advan

          • There is still a large wage differential between the former DDR lander (states) and the rest. Dresden has not only been in the chip business (Infineon is also there), it has also been the home to some high precision instrument manufacture and research centres.

            One of the reasons we build some units in the US is the gap, Germans make MORE than US citizens for our tasks, lower skill, highly repetitive. The German companies we hire to manufacture are farming it out to Muldavia or such, where labor is cheap (

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 21, 2003 @05:29AM (#7527066)
        greetings from saxony,

        thanks for the congratulations.
        according to hector ruiz the main selling points of dresden wasn't wages (cost of labour is one of the highest in germany due to all the taxes) *but* high density of skilled workers, universities (laugh at it - but dresden was the center of microporcessor design in former eastern germany since the 60s or so :) and other chip makers. for instance infineon raised their first 300 mm fab there. of course many tool companies like applied materials are allready present there. (this was one of the drawbacks of SE-asia btw. nobody has done 300 mm there yet)

        but the biggest selling points were guarantees for the debts they had to take and a huge chunk of money from the state (saxony) and the federation (frg) - several hundred millions.

        also - opposite to the traditional prejudice about german bureaucracy - all the paper stuff was done real quick and without any hassle for amd. but the state of saxony has somewhat of a track record in this regard. you can see all that prejudices justified 100 miles to the north where intel and some shejkh from dubai want to raise a fab too - for several years now. google for communicant and frankfurt.

        one more thing - amd *might* have build their factory in china too. but present us law prohobits exporting certain technologies there.

        have a good day over there

        andreas

      • It's not so much the cost - it's more the cost effectiveness.

        I remember hearing a company say that even with the higher employee costs in Germany, it ends up costing the same as places like South America, because the workers are much more effective.

        Germans are certainly good engineers - just look at their cars. Germany also has a strong infrastructure, so things like telecommunications and transport are very reliable, and I'm sure that the German government gave AMD

        Of course, the other reason for choo

        • and I'm sure that the German government gave AMD

          ... an incentive.

          Note to self: don't get involved in long discussions in the middle of writing a post.

          -- Steve

      • Most likely they received lots of grants from Saxony government (Saxony, or whichever german state it is :) ). They're allowed to do this because Dresden is in the former DDR, and hence needs development, so have a concession from the EU to give subsidies to attract investment. Same reason why Intel have 2 FABs in Ireland and are building a third - because of grants and subsidies from the Irish govt.
      • Check out IIC's website [www.iic.de]. The IIC is a quasi-governmental group attracting businesses to eastern Germany, and they also had a hand in all of this.

        This is great news for eastern Germany, in particular the Dresden area, which has really been on hard times since reunification. Hopefully this will also help fight the nascent neo-Nazism that was budding in Saxony for a while...that seems to have quieted down in recent years.

        Cheers,

        Ethelred

      • Why they didn't go the Malaysia or Philippines as you mentioned I don't know. Perhaps the current unrest in the world?

        Because the Germans guaranteed the necessary loans. AMD's balance sheet has been so bloody of years past, that there wasn't anyway that AMD would have been able to swing the loans without a consigner. Aren't a lot of parents out there who can co-sign a $2.4 Billion note. [siliconstrategies.com] From the article...

        Press reports quoted regional government sources in the state of Saxony as anticipating that AMD will

    • Re:Cost of labor (Score:4, Informative)

      by 10Ghz ( 453478 ) on Friday November 21, 2003 @05:21AM (#7527054)
      AMD chips are packaged in Malaysia as well (that's what the "made in Malaysia" refers to). But the actual chips are made in Dresden. Intel's chips are also made elsewhere (for example, Israel).
      • Intel has quite a few FABs in various parts of the world, including Israel, Malaysia and Ireland as well as USA (cant remember where their FABs are in US. But they did buy DEC's old FAB in Cambridge, MA.)
        • I'm well aware of that. I just didn't feel like listing them all, so I just used their fab in Israel as an example.
        • Intel's main fabs are in Oregon, New Mexico, California, Massachusetts, Israel, and Ireland (there may be a few others in the US which I'm forgetting).

          Intel doesn't have a fab in Malaysia. There is chip packaging in Malaysia, as well as Costa Rica and Philipines.

    • Re:Cost of labor (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Devices are marked with the location of the packaging plant, not the location of the fab that made the actual chip inside. Malaysia, Thailand, the Philipinnes and other cheap labour areas are popular locations for packaging plants, as these used to be very labour intensive (they are highly automated now, but the plants haven't moved). Most fabs are located in more developed countries - US, Japan, Taiwan, etc.
    • Packaging does not mean fabbing. Fabbing is building up and etching the silicon with several layers of different chemicals and processes. Packaging is mounting the die and connecting the pins to a PGA or some other type of package that you see when you buy a chip. A lot of Intel's chips are fabbed in the US but packaged in the countries you named. There was a guest article at anandtech that makes this clearer.
    • As others have mentioned, Intel just has their chips packaged in Malaysia, the Philippines, etc. Similarly AMD has almost all of their chips packaged in Malaysia. FWIW most of Intel's actually chip fabs are in the US. Oregon to be exact. They also have a couple plants in Ireland and in Isreal. To the best of my knowledge they do not have any plants in south-east Asia.

      In any case, here's a few numbers for you.. A typical plant these days costs about $2.5 billion dollars to build. Equipment in that pl

      • Re:Cost of labor (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dastardly ( 4204 )
        Oregon to be exact. They also have a couple plants in Ireland and in Isreal.

        Don't forget Arizona and New Mexico.

        Also, wafer fab is a very automated process. I have seen some Fab lines, and there are maybe 10 people inside the clean room where the lines are running. Then, there are another 10-20 people in wafer test. Then, maybe a few 10s of people in other locations doing other manufacturing or test processes. But, what you end up with is that you are probably talking about less than 100 people per s
    • Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to put facilities that mass produce chips in countries where labor is cheap? Most Intel chips I've seen are marked "Made in Malaysia" or "Made in the Philippines."

      Check out an AMD chip someday they also say "Made in Malaysia". The reason is that, is the location where the chips are packaged. Intel chips are packaged in the Phillipines and Malaysia as you have noted. AMD's microprocessor Fab is in Dresden, but packaging is in Malaysia, and Final Test is in Singapore. AM

    • Wouldn't it be cheaper for them to put facilities that mass produce chips in countries where labor is cheap? Most Intel chips I've seen are marked "Made in Malaysia" or "Made in the Philippines."

      Intel doesn't have any fabs in those countries either...most of theirs are in the US, with a few others scattered here and there around the world. The only work that Intel has done in places like Malaysia or the Philippines is splitting dice off of wafers and attaching them to packaging to make a completed micr

      • As for packaging...you would think that would be fairly automated as well. (Could you eyeball the correct positioning of an Opteron die such that all 940 contacts, all of which are shoehorned into an area on the order of 100 mm^2, would line up properly?) Why they send out for packaging is beyond me, especially since you'd think that shipping costs would eat up a fair chunk of whatever they're saving.

        Actually, shipping wafers probably doesn't cost much per die because you get around 100-200 chips per wafe

  • 300mm (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This [cnn.com] is what 300 mm refers to.
  • Thank you AMD for laying the foundation of the Saxony (Silicon) Valley together with Infineon. Thank you for recognizing the talent, education, pracmatism and working power of the patient and friendly Saxony people. Your payback is visible as you are now nearly your break even. Thank for enjoying our great land and cultural as well as industrial heritage.

    May also come the great R&D Transmeta, Big Blue, Samsung and Motorola here. You will get our working power and you will fall love too.

  • So we've all agreed that 300mm isn't the chip size, so it must be the size of the fab itself. Yes AMD are building the worlds smallest fab, and employing little goblins to make, by hand, the worlds smallest chips.

    Next generation AMD processors will require no power supply as they will have tiny elves inside on treadmills which act both as the power and the clock cycle. Elves have been tested at IBMs labs up to 4.2THz which appears to be their physical limit for peak speed. The advantage of using Elves i

    • Re:Building size... (Score:2, Informative)

      by FireFury03 ( 653718 )
      300mm is the diameter of the silicon wafer.
      A large number of dies are constructed on the circular wafer, tested and the wafer is then cut up with a diamond saw. At this point the dies that failed the tests are binned (there certainly used to be a very high failure rate - not sure how high it is these days though).
      AMD makes their CPUs as "flip-chips" these days, thich means that the die is bonded directly onto a PCB, instead of embedding it in ceramic or plastic.
  • When will Cyrix be coming out with their next big thing?!
  • I couldn't find any reference anywhere to the feature size to be used on these 300mm wafers. Is it 90nm?
    • The feature size is independant of the fab tooling. AMD will implement the smallest affordable feature size at the time the fab comes on line and most likely will be running two feature sizes. Depending on who is making their chips in two years (probably IBM) they will most likely use the same masks and try to get matching silicon up to production levels.

      The fab is mostly just the facility (shake proof bldg, class 1, 10, 100, etc, wafer handling). What goes into the fab is the latest equiptment. That
      • The feature size is independant of the fab tooling. AMD will implement the smallest affordable feature size at the time the fab comes on line and most likely will be running two feature sizes. Depending on who is making their chips in two years (probably IBM) they will most likely use the same masks and try to get matching silicon up to production levels.

        This does not sem to be entirely true. Because there appears to be a point at which it is less costly to just build a new plant, than to refit an old p
    • 65nm initially, with plans to switch to the next generation (45nm?) a few years down the road.

  • This is about the whole keep it in the States vs. Maylasia thing.

    I know nothing about this industry so I'll just let someone take this:

    Is there really that much of a economy of scale for moving a chip plant to Maylasia? I see that industry of creating and manufacturing processors and other computer whatnots to be EXTREMELY quality oriented work where the clock, quality, and price are an paramount. It looks like a tightrope act.

    So my question becomes this: with all of that quality and issue
    • See my earlier post. US companies are not for the most part moving FABs to Asia. Mostly packaging and final test. I go through the reasons for it, but it basically boils down to packaged processors are about 10x as bulky as the die on a wafer. Therefore, it takes about 10x the labor just to move them to and from the package line or test equipment.
  • Take a look at the photo in the top-left corner of the linked press release from AMD.

    Could that guy possibly be any more German?! :>

  • The 1,000 jobs created by this plant are a far cry from the 100,000 that were killed on Feb 13-15, 1945. The city of dresden was basically annihilated by American and British allied forces in 3 days by 1250 sorties. They used a firebomb technique to make sure that they could kill as many people as they could. These were refugees, not Nazi soldiers. Bombing of Dresden [schoolnet.co.uk]
    • These were refugees

      Indeed, they were refugees. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union and got pushed back by the Red Army, for some reason civilians felt the need to flee. Thus, they became "refugees." I'll bet the Russians had another name for them...

      The 1,000 jobs created by this plant are a far cry from the 100,000 that were killed on Feb 13-15, 1945.

      100,000 is on the high side and likely to be exaggeration. 1000 is on the low side. That's just the number of people directly employed by AMD.

      T

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