Need to weed out the kids.
Fabs will be outrageous in cost.
Everything in chip making points to one immutable conculsion.
Insist on Cymer!!!

ISMI 450 mm Program Moving to Next Stage
The ISMI 450 mm wafer program is moving to a new stage, going beyond wafer handling to blanket film deposition and metrology, said ISMI 450 mm program manager Tom Jefferson. Speaking at the close of the ISMI Symposium in Austin, Texas, Jefferson said the program will install a wafer cleaning tool next week, and is sending out single-crystal test wafers to equipment suppliers.
David Lammers, News Editor -- Semiconductor International, 10/23/2009
Step-by-step and tool-by-tool, the Sematech 450 mm wafer transition program is moving to a new phase, going beyond the wafer-handling effort to development of wafer processing and metrology equipment, ISMI 450 mm program director Tom Jefferson said at the ISMI Symposium held in Austin, Texas.


Tom Jefferson, ISMI

Several hundred manufacturing experts gathered this week for the annual ISMI Symposium, organized by the International Sematech Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI, Austin). Jefferson, an Intel assignee to ISMI, told symposium participants that the 450 mm program is evolving to development of "the initial toolsets," including a wet wafer cleaning tool from Solid State Equipment Corp. (SSEC, Horsham, Pa.) that will be moved into the cleanroom in Austin next Wednesday. The SSEC tool will sit alongside existing NanoPhotonics AG (Mainz, Germany) particle-detection and edge-inspection metrology tools installed earlier this year.

In the next phase, ISMI will send out 450 mm single-crystal, mechanical-grade silicon test wafers in newly designed shipping carriers, called HMACs, which are designed to the same size specifications and handling techniques used for the 25-wafer FOUPs. "We will loan test wafers to metrology and equipment vendors," Jefferson said. "The way it might work is for one company to do a blanket film deposition, and then send the test wafer on to a metrology company. To do that, we are developing a better supply of test wafers."


ISMI plans to install a wet single-wafer cleaning tool from SSEC Oct. 28.

Over the past few years, the 450 mm program has defined and developed the initial 450 mm wafer carriers, with a 12 mm pitch. ISMI has worked with SEMI to define the 450 mm wafer thickness of 925 mm, with an edge exclusion of 1.5 mm, a wafer positioning notch, and other specifications that are set to be voted on as part of the SEMI standards-setting process, perhaps by the end of this year. Using polysilicon test wafers, the ISMI Interoperability Test Bed (ITB) in Austin has developed 450 mm load ports and EFEMs, and robotics have been developed and tested over ~5 million cycles.

Jefferson read out a list of ~20 companies that have participated in the ITB, saying, "We could not have accomplished what we have without their full participation." He added, "The work at the ITB is almost done. It will sunset."