IBM Corp’s Microelectronics division is investing in one of the world’s first 300mm wafer facilities at a new facility near its current Advanced Semiconductor Technology Center in East Fishkill, New York, with the first chips expected to emerge in late 1999. The industry currently builds chips in 200mm silicon wafers, and the $700m facility should enable IBM to produce roughly 2.5 times more chips per wafer at less than two times the production cost than at present. The facility will use IBM’s new copper manufacturing process, and electronic circuitry drawn onto the first new chips from the plant will be 0.18 microns wide, with development quickly moving to 0.15 micron technology, says IBM. The x-ray lithography facility at East Fishkill will be adapted to manufacture chips on 300mm wafers. IBM plans to produce 1Gb Dynamic RAM chips initially, but move on to microprocessors, controllers, customized chips and other logic devices. And further into the future, development activity will include the use of silicon germanium for high-speed communications chips. Silicon germanium devices can operate at speeds greater than 100GHz, 500 times faster than current Intel Corp Pentium processors. Copper manufacturing and silicon germanium process research have been carried out jointly by IBM Microelectronics and the nearby IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York (CI No 3,252).
