Monolithic 3D Inc., the Next Generation 3D-IC Company
  • Home
  • Technology
    • Technology
    • Papers, Presentations and Patents
    • Overview >
      • Background
      • Why Monolithic 3D?
      • Paths to Monolithic 3D
      • Applications
    • Ion-Cut: The Building Block
    • Monolithic 3D Logic >
      • RCAT
      • HKMG
      • Laser Annealing
      • RCJLT
      • 3D Embedded RAM
      • 3D Gate Array
      • FPGA
      • Ultra Large Integration - Redundancy and Repair
    • Monolithic 3D Memory >
      • 3D DRAM
      • 3D Resistive Memories
      • 3D Flash
    • Monolithic 3D Electro-Optics >
      • 3D Image Sensors
      • 3D Micro-Displays
  • 3D-IC Edge
    • 3D-IC Edge
  • News & Events
    • News & Events
    • S3S15 Game Change 2.0 Video/P
    • Webcast
    • Webinar
    • Press Releases
    • In the News
    • Upcoming Events
  • About Us
    • About Us
    • History
    • Team
    • Careers
    • Contact Us
  • Blog
  • Simulators

Keynote speech at IITC from Globalfoundries

5/9/2011

0 Comments

 
Like I said in my last blog-post, I’m at IITC this week. The keynote speech of the conference was given by Dirk Wristers, VP of Technology & Integration at Globalfoundries. It was quite interesting, let me share some details...
Dirk Wristers is an old-time AMD person who joined Globalfoundries in Dresden a year back. I found him and his talk impressive… he was familiar with the economics of semiconductor manufacturing, and shared many numbers I found fascinating.

The first set of numbers he quoted is shown in Fig. 1. It shows the cost of development for the 28nm-node. He said the numbers involved are so high that leading edge process nodes make economic sense only for products with high volumes :-( He also mentioned that the 28nm node is going to be a “long-lived” node, not many people will want to scale beyond that…

Hmmm… what do I think of Dirk’s numbers in Fig. 1? Well, I think semiconductor startups are becoming an endangered species…  The numbers quoted in Fig. 1 have ensured VCs don’t fund semiconductor startups anymore :-( It costs $100M for a leading edge design, and if you’re a startup, you typically don’t make money off your first product. So, you need to spend $100-150M more on your second product before you can turn a profit. The VC therefore needs to invest $200-250M and wait at least 5 years before he gets any return on investment. On the other hand, in a software startup such as Groupon, you invest $5M and it gets converted to $5B in just 2 years!

Another set of numbers Dirk presented are shown in Fig. 2. You can see the cost of patterning a single litho layer with double patterning is 1.7x higher than for single patterning… EUV can help, said Dirk (as Fig. 2 indicates). But then, EUV seems perennially delayed (see my post from 2 weeks back on the subject here). People are, in fact, thinking of costlier quad patterning approaches for future nodes. The bottom line: Double-patterning and quad-patterning are pretty costly, and make conventional scaling difficult moving forward.

The way to deal with these issues, according to Dirk, is collaboration. He talked about their collaborative process development with IBM and Samsung and also about the collaborative development they’re having with design houses to build products. He said the industry needs to look at EUV and 3D packaging quite seriously to bring cost down.

There were a number of questions I had for Dirk, but I really couldn’t ask them in public since they were kind of sensitive…  he had to rush off after the talk, so I couldn’t ask him these questions in a one-on-one conversation either.
  • Does it make economic sense to build fabs in the US and Europe? It is well known that the wafer cost is 30-40% lower in Taiwan/Singapore than in the US/Europe due to government concessions and tax breaks. For example, I hear Singapore pays 60% of the equipment costs and products are tax-free for 10 years when one builds a fab there.  That’s a lot of cost savings, and that’s what drove manufacturing to the Far-East.  Does Globalfoundries plan to have more capacity in Singapore and Abu Dhabi moving forward (at least when compared to the US and Europe)?
  • What volumes do you need to turn a profit for a 28nm product (in the year it is introduced)? If you did a plot of volumes required vs. technology node (for different nodes), maybe you can figure out the economic limits of conventional scaling for different applications. For someone with the volumes that AMD has, when is it economically unviable to scale?
submit to reddit
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    Search Blog


    Meet the Bloggers


    Follow us


    To get email updates subscribe here:


    Recommended Links

    3D IC Community
    3D IC LinkedIn Discussion Group

    Recommended Blogs

    • 3D InCites by Francoise von Trapp
    • EDA360 Insider by Steve Leibson
    • Insights From the Leading Edge by Phil Garrou
    • SemiWiki by Daniel Nenni, Paul Mc Lellan, et al.

    Archives

    March 2022
    December 2021
    August 2021
    August 2018
    July 2018
    May 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    December 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    September 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011

    Categories

    All
    3d Design And Cad
    3dic
    3d Ic
    3d Nand
    3d Stacking
    3d Technology
    Brian Cronquist
    Dean Stevens
    Deepak Sekar
    Dram
    Education
    Heat Removal And Power Delivery
    Industry News
    Israel Beinglass
    Iulia Morariu
    Iulia Tomut
    Monolithic3d
    Monolithic 3d
    MonolithIC 3D Inc.
    Monolithic 3d Inc.
    Monolithic 3d Technology
    Moore Law
    Outsourcing
    Paul Lim
    Repair
    Sandisk
    Semiconductor
    Semiconductor Business
    Tsv
    Zeev Wurman
    Zvi Or Bach
    Zvi Or-Bach

    RSS Feed

© Copyright MonolithIC 3D Inc. , the Next-Generation 3D-IC Company, 2012 - All Rights Reserved, Patents Pending