Very few chip factories are built from the ground up these days. So I leaped at the chance to visit GlobalFoundries' new facility in upstate New York. While the factory is still years away from mass producing chips for our computers and cell phones, it's still impressive, both in the magnitude of the facility and the advanced technology that it represents.

There are two main approaches to making high-end chips. A few companies, notably Intel and the memory manufacturers, design their own chips and manufacture them in their chip fabrication facilities, known as "fabs."

Most of the rest of the industry consists of "fabless" semiconductor companies that design chips (examples include Qualcomm and Nvidia) and "foundries," companies that manufacture chips for the design companies. The leading foundries have been TSMC and UMC, both based in Taiwan, along with China's SMIC and until recently Singapore's Chartered. Samsung and IBM both have foundry groups which are parts of the larger companies.

GlobalFoundries is a new foundry company that combines the chip-making operations that used to be part of AMD along with Chartered Semiconductor in an alliance funded by ATIC, an investment arm of Abu Dhabi. GlobalFoundries is different from the other companies in having foundries in lots of locations, including six in Singapore (which used to be Chartered), one large one in Dresden, Germany (which used to be called two foundries by AMD); and one under construction in the Luther Forest Technology Campus in Saratoga County, New York, about half an hour north of Albany.

This new facility, called Fab 8, is huge. The project underway, which is just the first stage of what could eventually be built on site, will be 1.3 million square feet and cost about $4.6 billion (including the equipment), according to Norm Armour, VP and General Manager of the facility, who said he believes it is the largest current construction project in the U.S. The construction cost alone is estimated at about $880 million, with the rest of the cost going to the high-end tools it takes to make chips these days.

(Note: The aerial shots and waffle table photos are courtesy of GlobalFoundries; I took the others).

There are a number of interesting factors that go into the facility. Rick Whitney, chief executive of M+W U.S., the contractor that is building the fab, and has built most of the GlobalFoundries fabs, explained that it was an easy site to build on, 170 feet above Saratoga Lake. But he said it was very different than AMD's Dresden, Germany facility, in that AMD originally built that for a single type of product. The new fab, by contrast, is being designed with a stronger focus on flexibility and cost efficiency. Non-critical areas, such as the office space, will be less expensive than in Dresden, he said.

One big difference between this facility and the Dresden fab is that it is only a two-story building instead of a three-story one. This is possible in part because of new technology used to circulate the air, according to Whitney.

As Armour explains it, the air in the clean room is completely exchanged six times an hour, most of it cleaned through HEPA filters and reused. In addition to the clean room where chip fabrication will take place, the main facility will also include locations for handling the materials and an office area that has yet to be started. There's also a "utility" building, which will manage things like the power used by the main building.

This initial facility will house a clean room that is capable of initially producing 35,000 300-mm diameter silicon wafers per month. (Each wafer can produce hundreds or thousands of chips, depending on the size of the silicon die.) Armour explained that there are plans to expand this line, which would increase production to 60,000 wafers per month, but that is not yet finalized. In fact, he said, GlobalFoundries actually has space on the site to build two more modules, which could theoretically triple production to 180,000 wafers per month, but that would be a long way off, and the company has not committed to building such lines. For comparison, the Dresden facility is also currently expanding, and will be able to produce 60,000 wafers per month.

Initially, the plan is for the first manufacturing tools to be installed in the summer of 2011, with the first silicon produced in the fourth quarter of 2011. But it then takes time to ramp the facility with quality testing and samples to customers. The first chips that end users are likely to get are slated for the first quarter of 2013, he said.

Initial production at the facility is expected to be low-power and general parts created on a 28-nm "high K-metal gate" process. GlobalFoundries will first bring this up in its Dresden facility, where it is slated for "risk production" in the second half of this year. Armour says it is easier to start production at a new location on a process that has already been tested elsewhere. The New York facility is slated to add 22nm shortly after it starts 28nm production.

The 28nm and 22nm production (as well as the 32nm SOI production that the Dresden facility will use to make AMD CPUs) will use 193nm immersion scanners, with succeeding generations needing immersion technology at more layers, and adding "double patterning."

For future nodes, at 16nm, the industry is looking at EUV technology for the critical layers, Armour notes. GlobalFoundries is part of IBM's Technology Alliance or "fab club" and a great deal of the research for production is done at IBM facilities in Burlington, Vermont and East Fishkill, New York. (See the post on the Luther Forest project for more on the location.)

Overall, it was a very impressive facility, and it's good to see this kind of construction taking place in the U.S. For more on my visit, check out this post too: GlobalFoundries: Will Upstate New York Be the Next Silicon Valley?

Originally posted to Michael Miller's blog, Forward Thinking.