At the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) held late last week, Intel unveiled the pride of its fabs, the industry's first fully-patterned (ready to slice) 450 mm wafer. Major semiconductor fabs around the world are locked in a race for who gets volume-production on 450 mm wafers going first. Among the contenders are Taiwan's TSMC, UAE's GlobalFoundries, and Korea's Samsung, and with the unveiling of the first fully-patterned wafer, Intel appears to have announced its lead. The 450 mm (diameter), thanks to its large surface area, significantly increases yields.

"[This] is an important step forward and it indicates that there will soon be substantial volume of patterned test wafers for use by suppliers in developing their 450 mm tools," stated Chuck Mulloy, a spokesperson for Intel. As for what Intel etched on the wafer, a report claims it could be large dies of simple (highly-patterned) devices such as flash. The fab reportedly used Impints' J-Fil imprint lithography technology that demonstrated 24 nm patterning with line edge roughness of less than 2 nm to 3Σ and critical dimension uniformity to 1.2 nm 3Σ, offering the prospect of 10 nm patterning with single-step process.