Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[SemiconEng]

What happens to the old tooling at Dresden (i.e. the 180 nanometer stuff and now the 130 nanometer stuff)? Can't it be shipped to another plant and used to produce flash?

Maybe. At the beginning of a new process, it might be possible, but once a process is up and running, I think it would be difficult to incorporate a different piece of equipment. Since AMD does not follow a Copy Exactly Philosophy, the last I read, AMD has different equipment at each Fab. Transferring the equipment, would require de-installing the equipment, shipping it to the new site, installing it, and qualifying the equipment to the Equipment manufacturers specs. Then it would require modifying the current flash process to work on the at least 2 different tools at whatever manufacturing step it is being used on, perhaps several steps.

This is a Process Engineers nightmare. Have different pieces of equipment running the same process step in a Fab creates difficulties, especially when things go wrong. Is it the Process? The tool? Will containment and solutions work on both tools? How would you know that a "fix" on one tool won't crash the other?

Improvements to the Process could also have to be done twice, once for each toolset, increasing labor costs, and delaying improvements Will the improvements work on both tools? Even if they work, will the End Of Line results be equal? What do you do if they're not? Modify the Process for each tool?

Alternately, You could use the equipment to take over all the Processing of a particular step, and not share that step between 2 different tools, but again, that would require requalification of the Process at that step, on a new toolset. Are the yields going to be the same? How long is it going to take to requalify the Process? Will the tool reuse cost savings be enough to offset the cost of requalifying the process?

Some equipment can be reused from Process to process. Recently, the problem has not been reusing equipment from Process to Process, as much as 200mm to 300mm. Based on all the issues I've highlighted above, I believe that it would probably be more cost effective to sell the equipment for whatever you can get, and be done with it.

Semi