Fab: Money doesn't have to be fun

It has been more than 10 years since the start of construction of 12-inch wafer fabs by large semiconductor companies all over the world. The biggest benefit of the 12-inch plants in these 10 years is to reduce the cost of the chips and make the semiconductor process You have to follow Moore's Law successfully.

Moore's Law has been developed so far, the world's mainstream process will formally enter the 28-nanometer generation in 2013, but in 2014 will re-enter 20-nanometer. Due to the small size of the process miniaturization, the economic scale brought by the 12-inch wafers has not been able to offset the high cost of the process miniaturization. Therefore, the 18-inch wafers that will go to larger wafer sizes will be the next 3 to In five years, the semiconductor factory can not walk away.

The advent of 18-inch wafer generation can bring benefits to the technology industry, including the cost of chips can be greatly reduced, compared to 12-inch wafers, the same process chip production in the 18-inch factory, the cost of at least a decline 3 into. The cost of the chip is effectively reduced, and the selling price of electronic products can also be closer to the people. Naturally, lower prices can bring greater demand. In the future, notebooks under $500, or smart phones with $100, are no longer dream.

In addition, the miniaturization of the process to 16/14 nm or 12/10 nm, the development of electronic chips toward 3D architecture, the biggest advantage is that power consumption can be reduced more significantly, so the advanced process applied to 18-inch wafers, ultra-low power consumption And the characteristics of ultra-power saving, just in line with the global trend of energy-saving and carbon reduction.

However, 18-inch wafers are not a game that every semiconductor manufacturer can afford. As long as the semiconductor factory has money to build factories and buy equipment, it can enjoy the cost advantages brought by the 12-inch plant. However, the 18-inch wafer is not only the wafer size becomes larger, the research and development technology is also more difficult to develop, especially in the development of lithography technology such as extreme ultraviolet (EUV) or multiple electron beam (Multi E-Beam) is the key, If you can't cross this threshold, even if you build a good 18-inch factory and build a good production line, there is no capacity for mass production.

From this point of view, the global semiconductor factories that have the ability to move to 18-inch wafers may not even reach 10 companies. Whoever has 18-inch plants in the future will be able to become the dominator of the semiconductor market and even control the sales of electronic products. TSMC 28 The sluggish sales of smart phones caused by the shortage of nano production capacity may be only a small case. Therefore, people in the industry believe that the alternation of generations of 18-inch plants will bring greater structural changes to the semiconductor industry.