How a Chip Gets Made: Visiting GlobalFoundries

I'thou ever fascinated to learn near what it actually takes to make the devices that we take for granted, and no process that I know of is as complex, complicated, or of import as making the processors that power our phones, PCs, and the servers that run our daily lives. So I jumped at the run a risk to visit GlobalFoundries' leading-border factory in Malta, New York, to see how the chip fabrication facility (or fab) has evolved over the past few years.

It'southward an amazing process—the fab includes over 1400 avant-garde tools for making chips, all continued together, and making a typical wafer that contains fries can take up to six months. I was very impressed by the ever-increasing complexity of this process, and the extraordinary precision that'southward required in order to make the chips that nosotros all utilize.

I've visited the factory—which in known as Fab 8—before, when it was under construction and when information technology had merely started to produce its first products: processors designed for the 32nm or 28nm process nodes.

The plant is in an interesting location: the Luther Woods Applied science Campus in Republic of malta, well-nigh half an hour north of Albany. For years, the land of New York has been pushing to bring more technology to the region, with efforts including support for the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Technology (CNSE) and the Albany Nanotech Circuitous, one of the earth'due south near advanced fleck research facilities, which includes representatives from GlobalFoundries, Samsung, IBM, many research universities, and all of the leading manufacturers of chipmaking tools. AMD had signed on to build a factory at the complex; when AMD dissever off its chipmaking operations to get GlobalFoundries in 2009 (now wholly owned by Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company), the new company congenital the factory.

On my last visit nearly six years ago, the get-go stage—which included a 210,000-square-foot cleanroom for actual manufacturing—was just up and running and doing early production, while Phase ii, with an boosted ninety,000 square anxiety, was under construction. There were 1,300 people on site, but relatively few products were being made at that time.

Fab 8 at GlobalFoundries

(Image from GlobalFoundries)

Today, those first two phases are a unmarried 300,000-square-pes cleanroom (300 feet wide past 1000 feet long) and an additional 160,000-foursquare-foot Stage iii is likewise in full functioning. I saw lots of activity, and many silicon wafers filled with chips being produced

Tom Caulfield, SVP & General Manager of Fab 8, emphasized that GlobalFoundries had invested much more in upstate New York than its original commitment. When the fab was get-go planned, the company committed to an investment of $3.2 billion, and a direct headcount of one,200 people for an almanac payroll of $72 meg. At present, he said, the company has actually invested more than $12 billion, and has nearly three,300 employees and a $345 million almanac payroll. And that's non fifty-fifty counting the 500 to 700 other individuals who work at the fab but are employed by other entities, he noted, such as technicians who work for tool vendors like ASML, Applied Materials, or LAM Research

GlobalFoundries also operates what information technology at present calls Fab ix in Burlington, Vermont, and Fab 10 in East Fishkill, New York, which are older factories it acquired from IBM. The company also has major fabs in Dresden, Federal republic of germany, where it is working on its FDX silicon-on-insulator process; Chengdu, China; and in Singapore. Overall, the company says it has more than 250 customers

Caulfield said that the fab is a single-source for AMD'south Ryzen processors, Radeon GPUs, and Epyc server fries, but also has dozens of other customers

GlobalFoundries is i of four companies that makes leading-edge logic chips. The others are Intel, which primarily makes chips for its own use; Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (TSMC), the pioneering chip foundry, which makes chips for many different customers and is GlobalFoundries' main competition; and Samsung, which does a petty of both.

Inside the Factory

On this visit, myself and several other journalists were given a tour of the facility and got to hear nearly how the chips are fabricated. Rather than start with the cleanroom where the chips are actually manufactured, the bout started in the "sub-fab," the vast expanse beneath the cleanroom that handles the equipment needed to run the tools that make the chips. This includes the electrical, mechanical, water, and chemical-handling systems.

John Painter, Senior Manager of Facilities, who gave the tour of this area, explained that the whole site includes over 70,000 pieces of equipment, much of which supports the smaller chipmaking tools within the cleanroom. Well-nigh all of those tools demand to be cooled, and they all piece of work improve in predicable temperatures, under certain humidity and pressure conditions, so significant effort is expended to control the environment. This is made more complex because tools are constantly refreshed, with some moving in and others out of the facility. Painter explained that in general it takes 6 times equally much space for the support equipment equally it does for the cleanroom.

We saw areas that process the chilled purified water used in manufacturing, and chemical slurries for things such as polishing the wafers. The fab has complex facilities monitoring and decision-making these systems—which are able to mensurate things in parts per trillion, and so they tin can detect any leak in the organization—besides as a sophisticated life condom system. The sub-fab has a 30-pes ceiling, and the Phase 2 area includes a mezzanine to make it easier for technicians to reach all of the equipment. This floor contains many dissever areas with individual pieces of equipment (from storage areas for water and chemicals to monitoring systems), with miles of piping connecting it to the cleanroom in a higher place. I noted that much of the piping was actually doubled, with sensors within the pipes to detect if there was a leak.

There are also a number of other buildings on site, including a central utility edifice with larger boilers and chillers, bulk waste material systems, and etc.

As a whole, the factory uses 80 megawatts of ability, which is supplied by dual 150,000 volt lines. Information technology is disquisitional that the power is continuous, every bit whatever variation could disrupt manufacturing and possibly damage the wafers being processed. Therefore, the facility has a backup UPS arrangement, flywheels, and a diesel generator.

I was particularly interested in the amount of space required by the new EUV equipment (which I'll discuss afterward). Even in the sub-floor, this equipment demands a massive surface area, including its own miniature cleanroom, where tools produce a high-intensity laser light source, which bends through the floor to the EUV tool in the cleanroom. The EUV organization itself necessitated new cooling and electrical systems, along with ultra-pure water, and special tanks and piping that reduce particle contamination.

To get the EUV system into the building, the main fab was first sealed off. A 10-ton crane was installed in the ceiling, and and then a hole cutting into the side of the building in order to motion the massive new system inside. This procedure was aided in part past a 3D figurer pattern organization that used scanned images that captured the placement of existing equipment downwards to the millimeter level.

Up to the Cleanroom

Cleanroom at GlobalFoundries

(Prototype from GlobalFoundries)

In gild to visit the cleanroom itself, nosotros had to wearing apparel in the "bunny suits" (see my film at the pinnacle of this post), designed to reduce the number of particles in the area and the gamble that such a particle could disrupt wafer processing.

One thing I noticed is that while there are lots of machines on the cleanroom floor—more than than 1,400, co-ordinate to GlobalFoundries—there aren't that many people.

Christopher Belfi, a principal engineer for manufacturing operations, who gave us the bout of the cleanroom, explained that the goal is to take cipher operators on the floor. The only people you do see are either doing installation or maintenance on the tools, Belfi said.

FOUPs at GlobalFoundries

(Prototype from GlobalFoundries)

Instead of technicians moving wafers from one tool to another, the wafers are routed betwixt the tools via Forepart-Opening Unified Pods, or FOUPs as they call them, each of which holds 25 wafers—and you lot can see these moving overhead throughout the cleanroom. In full, at that place are 550 vehicles on 14 miles of track moving and storing wafers betwixt tools. These also move reticles (the chip masks that guide the lite for each layer of chipmaking) between a key storage facility to the tools where they will be used. This doesn't reduce the number of people required, Belfi said, as the tools yet need to exist controlled, but does reduce time and error. He noted that at whatsoever given time, dozens of products are in various stages of manufacture, for several dozen customers, and each production has its ain prepare of reticles and its own specific process that uses different tools. Belfi called Fab eight "the most automated fab in the earth." Of course, it'south as well one of the newest.

Some of the fab has a yellow light, every bit at i point in the history of the manufacturing process it was important to brand certain that the wafer wasn't exposed to normal light. Even so, these days the wafers aren't exposed to outside light at all, then it'southward less necessary.

In that location are many steps involved in making a wafer, and each has its ain surface area of the cleanroom: implant (calculation ions to the silicon), chemic mechanical planarization or CMP (polishing the wafer), diffusion, thin-picture deposition, lithography, and etch. Metrology tools used to measure chip features at each step along the way are located throughout the fab.

We tend to talk about lithography the most (which refers to using light to expose a design on the wafer), every bit this is what has go the most complicated step in the last few years. The current technique, which involves using 193nm lite in a liquid (known as immersion lithography), is no longer fine enough to create the smallest elements in a chip in a single laissez passer, so for nodes such every bit 14nm and 7nm, multiple exposures (sometimes called double patterning or even quad patterning) are required. Extreme ultraviolet or EUV is a more complex alternative, but i that may be necessary if nosotros are to continue to get smaller features on chips, and GlobalFoundries is in the procedure of installing 2 of these EUV machines, with space for ii more. (I'll have more details in the next post.) Since that isn't set up, for now all of the chips made at GlobalFoundries (and indeed, all the commercial chips I know of fabricated anywhere) are produced with immersion lithography. But all of the steps are crucial, and any error in any step volition likely render chips on the wafer useless.

In full, a current chip can involve up to fourscore layers, and fifty-fifty more steps as wafers pass between the various steps of the process, particularly as they go back and forth between lithography and etch in each multi-patterning step (it can take months to produce a typical high-stop chip). It's a fascinating procedure and one I'm glad I got to see firsthand.

In my next postal service, I'll focus more on the EUV equipment that was recently installed at the factory, also as on GlobalFoundries' plans for time to come steps in the chipmaking process.