A few days ago, we published a report about Intel's 18A yields being at an abysmal 10%. This sparked quite a lot of discussion among the tech community, as well as responses from industry analysts and Intel's now ex-CEO Pat Gelsinger. Today, we are diving into known information about Intel's 18A node and checking out what the yields of possible products could be, using tools such as Die Yield Calculator from SemiAnalysis. First, we know that the defect rate of the 18A node is 0.4 defects per cm². This information is from August, and up-to-date defect rates could be much lower, especially since semiconductor nodes tend to evolve even when they are production-ready. To measure yields, manufacturers use various yield models based on the information they have, like the aforementioned 0.4 defect density. Expressed in defects per square centimeter (def/cm²), it measures manufacturing process quality by quantifying the average number of defects present in each unit area of a semiconductor wafer.

Measuring yields is a complex task. Manufacturers design some smaller chips for mobile and some bigger chips for HPC tasks. Thus, these two would have different yields, as bigger chips require more silicon area and are more prone to defects. Smaller mobile chips occupy less silicon area, and defects occurring on the wafer often yield more usable chips than wasted silicon. Stating that a node only yields x% of usable chips is only one side of the story, as the size of the test production chip is not known. For example, NVIDIA's H100 die is measuring at 814 mm²—a size that is pushing modern manufacturing to its limits. The size of a modern photomask, the actual pattern mask used in printing the design of a chip to silicon wafer, is only 858 mm² (26x33 mm). Thus, that is the limit before exceeding the mask and needing a redesign. At that size, nodes are yielding much less usable chips than something like a 100 mm² mobile chip, where defects don't wreak havoc on the yield curve.

Canon Inc. announced today that it will ship its most advanced lithography platform, the FPA-1200NZ2C nanoimprint lithography (NIL) system for semiconductor manufacturing, to the Texas Institute for Electronics (TIE), a Texas-based semiconductor consortium. Canon became the first in the world to commercialize a semiconductor manufacturing system that uses NIL technology, which forms circuit patterns in a different method from conventional projection exposure technology, when it released the FPA-1200NZ2C on October 13, 2023.

In contrast to conventional photolithography equipment, which transfers a circuit pattern by projecting it onto the resist coated wafer, the new product does it by pressing a mask imprinted with the circuit pattern into the resist on the wafer like a stamp. Because its circuit pattern transfer process does not go through an optical mechanism, fine circuit patterns on the mask can be faithfully reproduced on the wafer. With reduced power consumption and cost, the new system enables patterning with a minimum linewidth of 14 nm, equivalent to the 5 nm node that is required to produce most advanced logic semiconductors currently available.

Infineon Technologies AG today announced that the company has succeeded in developing the world's first 300 mm power gallium nitride (GaN) wafer technology. Infineon is the first company in the world to master this groundbreaking technology in an existing and scalable high-volume manufacturing environment. The breakthrough will help substantially drive the market for GaN-based power semiconductors. Chip production on 300 mm wafers is technologically more advanced and significantly more efficient compared to 200 mm wafers, since the bigger wafer diameter offers 2.3 times more chips per wafer.

GaN-based power semiconductors find fast adoption in industrial, automotive, and consumer, computing & communication applications, including power supplies for AI systems, solar inverters, chargers and adapters, and motor-control systems. State-of-the art GaN manufacturing processes lead to improved device performance resulting in benefits in end customers' applications as it enables efficiency performance, smaller size, lighter weight, and lower overall cost. Furthermore, 300 mm manufacturing ensures superior customer supply stability through scalability.

Texas Instruments (TI) (Nasdaq: TXN) and the U.S. Department of Commerce have signed a non-binding Preliminary Memorandum of Terms for up to $1.6 billion in proposed direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to support three 300 mm wafer fabs already under construction in Texas and Utah. In addition, TI expects to receive an estimated $6 billion to $8 billion from the U.S. Department of Treasury's Investment Tax Credit for qualified U.S. manufacturing investments. The proposed direct funding, coupled with the investment tax credit, would help TI provide a geopolitically dependable supply of essential analog and embedded processing semiconductors.

"The historic CHIPS Act is enabling more semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the U.S., making the semiconductor ecosystem stronger and more resilient," said Haviv Ilan, president and CEO of Texas Instruments. "Our investments further strengthen our competitive advantage in manufacturing and technology as we expand our 300 mm manufacturing operations in the U.S. With plans to grow our internal manufacturing to more than 95% by 2030, we're building geopolitically dependable, 300 mm capacity at scale to provide the analog and embedded processing chips our customers will need for years to come."

Imec, a world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics and digital technologies, today announced the demonstration of high quality 300 mm-Si-based quantum dot spin qubit processing with devices resulting in a statistically relevant, average charge noise of 0.6µeV/√ Hz at 1 Hz. In view of noise performance, the values obtained are the lowest charge noise values achieved on a 300 mm fab-compatible platform.

Such low noise values enable high-fidelity qubit control, as reducing the noise is critical for maintaining quantum coherence and high fidelity control. By demonstrating those values, repeatedly and reproducibly, on a 300 mm Si MOS quantum dot process, this work makes large-scale quantum computers based on Si quantum dots a realistic possibility.

TSMC today unveiled its newest semiconductor process, advanced packaging, and 3D IC technologies for powering the next generation of AI innovations with silicon leadership at the Company's 2024 North America Technology Symposium. TSMC debuted the TSMC A16 technology, featuring leading nanosheet transistors with innovative backside power rail solution for production in 2026, bringing greatly improved logic density and performance. TSMC also introduced its System-on-Wafer (TSMC-SoW) technology, an innovative solution to bring revolutionary performance to the wafer level in addressing the future AI requirements for hyperscaler datacenters.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of TSMC's North America Technology Symposium, and more than 2,000 attended the event, growing from less than 100 attendees 30 years ago. The North America Technology Symposium in Santa Clara, California kicks off TSMC Technology Symposiums around the world in the coming months. The symposium also features an "Innovation Zone," designed to highlight the technology achievements of our emerging start-up customers.

MICLEDI Microdisplays today announced a first closing of its Series A funding round with participation from imec.xpand, PMV, imec, KBC and SFPIM demonstrating strong support for the company's value proposition and commercial and technological progress achieved in the seed round. Series A follows a significant seed round award and additional non-dilutive funding in the form of grants and other vehicles from VLAIO. This brings the company's total funding to date to nearly $30 million.

"The company's achievements during this seed round have been astounding," said Sean Lord, CEO of MICLEDI. "Our door is open to engagements with some of the world's largest and most innovative electronic product manufacturing companies, most of whom are working on their own internal development projects for augmented reality (AR) displays in such diverse use cases as smart-wearable devices and automotive HUDs. This level of total funding to date is almost unheard of for a four-year-old startup."

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is set to open its new semiconductor fabrication plant in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, on February 24. This facility, known as Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), represents a significant milestone for Japan's semiconductor industry. JASM spans 52 hectares and is designed to produce mature 40, 22/28, and 12/16 nm fabrication technologies in the Fab 1. The Fab 1 has an initial monthly capacity of 40,000 300 mm wafers, scalable to 50,000 wafers per month in the near term. However, TSMC is set to expand the Kumamoto facility with Fab 2, which will produce 7 nm and 6 nm nodes and is scheduled to begin operations at the end of the 2027 calendar year. The Japanese government is set to subsidize the Fab 2 expansion with around $5 billion in aid. Combining Fab 1 and Fab 2, the JASM Kumamoto facility could produce 100,000 300 mm wafers per month once the production of Fab 2 starts. According to market research firm TrendForce, JASM provides significant additional capacity for TSMC amid a global chip shortage. It also boosts Japan's domestic chipmaking capabilities, reducing reliance on imports.

JASM is the first brand-new foreign-operated fab built in Japan. The Japanese government provided grants and tax breaks to incentivize Kumamoto Fab 1 construction as part of a national strategy to re-shore more semiconductor production and is now doing it again with Fab 2. TSMC also received subsidies from customers like Sony, SSS, DENSO and Toyota. Dr. CC Wei, CEO of TSMC, stated that JASM will "shape Japan's semiconductor landscape over the next decade." TrendForce analysts echo this sentiment, noting that JASM's advanced nodes will enable cutting-edge chip designs from Japanese automotive and consumer electronics brands. The inauguration ceremony on February 24 will be attended by TSMC partners, customers, and government representatives. JASM is expected to ramp up production over the coming year. TSMC has other non-Taiwan investments, like the facility in construction in Phoenix, Arizona, which will start mass production of chips by the end of 2027 or early 2028. At that point, the global semiconductor capacity constraints will ease significantly.

Texas Instruments (TI) today broke ground on its new 300-mm semiconductor wafer fabrication plant (or "fab") in Lehi, Utah. Joined by Utah Governor Spencer Cox, state and local elected officials, as well as community leaders, TI President and Chief Executive Officer Haviv Ilan celebrated the first steps toward construction of the new fab, LFAB2, which will connect to the company's existing 300-mm wafer fab in Lehi. Once completed, TI's two Utah fabs will manufacture tens of millions of analog and embedded processing chips every day at full production.

"Today we take an important step in our company's journey to expand our manufacturing footprint in Utah. This new fab is part of our long-term, 300-mm manufacturing roadmap to build the capacity our customers will need for decades to come," said Ilan. "At TI, our passion is to create a better world by making electronics more affordable through semiconductors. We are proud to be a growing member of the Utah community, and to manufacture analog and embedded processing semiconductors that are vital for nearly every type of electronic system today."

STMicroelectronics, a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, and GlobalFoundries Inc., a global leader in feature-rich semiconductor manufacturing, today announced they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to create a new, jointly-operated 300 mm semiconductor manufacturing facility adjacent to ST's existing 300 mm facility in Crolles, France. This facility is targeted to ramp at full capacity by 2026, with up to 620,000 300 mm wafer per year production at full build-out (~42% ST and ~58% GF).

ST and GF are committed to building capacity for their European and global customer base. This new facility will support several technologies, in particular FD-SOI-based technologies, and will cover multiple variants. This includes GF's market leading FDX technology and ST's comprehensive technology roadmap down to 18 nm, which are expected to remain in high demand for Automotive, IoT, and Mobile applications for the next few decades. FD-SOI technology has origins in the Grenoble (France) area. It has been part of ST technology and product roadmap in its Crolles facility since the early beginnings, and it was later enabled with differentiation and commercialized for manufacturing at GF's Dresden facility. FD-SOI offers substantial benefits for designers and customers, including ultra-low power consumption as well as easier integration of additional features such as RF connectivity, mmWave and security.

In its relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, Intel is unveiling key packaging, transistor and quantum physics breakthroughs fundamental to advancing and accelerating computing well into the next decade. At IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) 2021, Intel outlined its path toward more than 10x interconnect density improvement in packaging with hybrid bonding, 30% to 50% area improvement in transistor scaling, major breakthroughs in new power and memory technologies, and new concepts in physics that may one day revolutionize computing.

"At Intel, the research and innovation necessary for advancing Moore's Law never stops. Our Components Research Group is sharing key research breakthroughs at IEDM 2021 in bringing revolutionary process and packaging technologies to meet the insatiable demand for powerful computing that our industry and society depend on. This is the result of our best scientists' and engineers' tireless work. They continue to be at the forefront of innovations for continuing Moore's Law," said Robert Chau, Intel Senior Fellow and general manager of Components Research.

Finally some good news from the semiconductor industry, Infineon has announced the opening of its new €1.6 billion, 300 mm, or 12-inch wafer semiconductor factory. That said, we're somewhat confused with the press release, as it states that "the chips are manufactured on 300-millimeter thin wafers, which at 40 micrometers are thinner than a human hair" and that Infineon is a "global pioneer in 300-millimeter thin-wafer technology". This is why you need someone to proofread press releases before distributing them.

Anyhow, back on topic. The fab has nearly 60,000 square meters of gross floor space and production will be ramped up over the next four to five years, so it's not going to alleviate the current chip shortage any time soon. The fab is located in Villach, Austria and has taken three years to build. The first wafers produced in the fab are said to be leaving it this week and although Infineon didn't specify what chips they'll end up as, the fab is set up to initially cater for the automotive industry, data centers and the renewable energy industry.

Robert Bosch GmbH, commonly known as just Bosch, has today unveiled the results of the company's biggest investment ever. On Monday, the company has unveiled its one billion Euro manufacturing facility, which roughly translates to 1.2 billion US Dollars. The manufacturing plant is located in Dresden, Germany, and it aims to supply the leading self-driving automobile companies with chips that are in great demand. As the main goal for the plant is to manufacture chips for the automotive industry, this new 7,200 m² Dresden facility is supposed to provide car makers with Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) for power management and tasks such as triggering the automatic braking system of cars.

The one billion Euro facility was funded partly by the funds coming from the European Union investment scheme, which donated as much as 200 million Euros ($243 million). The goal of the plan is to start with the manufacturing of chips for power tools as early as July and start production of automotive chips in September. All of the chips will be manufactured on 300 mm wafers, which offers a major improvement in quantity compared to 200 and 150 mm wafers currently used by Bosch. The opening of this facility will surely help with the global chip shortages, which have even hit the automotive sector.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF ), the global leader in feature-rich semiconductor manufacturing, and GlobalWafers Co., Ltd. (GWC), one of the top silicon wafer manufacturers in the world, today announced an $800 million agreement to add 300 mm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer manufacturing and expand existing 200 mm SOI wafer production at GWC's MEMC facility in O'Fallon, Missouri.

The silicon wafers produced by GWC are key input materials for semiconductors and an integral part of GF's supply chain. The wafers are used in GF's multi-billion dollar manufacturing facilities, or fabs, where they are used to manufacture the computer chips that are pervasive and vital to the global economy. Today's announcement expands GF's domestic silicon wafer supply from the United States.

UMC has announced plans to invest $3.6 billion in increasing output from its 28 nm manufacturing facilities. This move comes amidst a global semiconductor shortage, and isn't the first time a semiconductor manufacturer "dust off" their older manufacturing processes as a way to remove pressure from more modern silicon manufacturing capabilities. In this case, UMC will be increasing manufacturing output from its 300 mm Fab 12A facility in Tainan, Taiwan.

UMC has entered agreements with some of its clients, who will be paying upfront for expected chip rollout in the future. In exchange, clients will get the benefits of preset pricing (thus avoiding any potential increases arising from increased demand or general price fluctuation), as well as UMC's assurance of certain manufacturing volume allocation towards their needs. Fab 12A currently manufactures 90,000 300 mm wafers per month (wpm). An additional 10,000 wpm is being installed this year and phase six will add another 27,500 wpm to the mix. The mature 28 nm tools will be installed in floors that already feature support for future tooling upgrades to 14 nm. UMC expects to hire around 1,000 additional employees as part of this expansion effort.

IC Insights recently released its September Update to the 2020 McClean Report that presented the second of a two-part analysis on the global IC foundry industry and included a look at the pure-play foundry market by region.

China was responsible for essentially all of the total pure-play foundry market increase in 2018. In 2019, the U.S./China trade war slowed China's economic growth but its foundry marketshare still increased by two percentage points to 21%. Moreover, despite the Covid-19 shutdown of China's economy earlier this year, China's share of the pure-play foundry market is forecast to be 22% in 2020, 17 percentage points greater than it registered in 2010 (Figure 1).

GLOBALFOUNDRIES ceased all operations in its joint-venture fab in Chengdu, China. The fab opened its doors in 2018, and was supposed to mass-produce 300 mm wafers on the 22FDX technology in a 65,000 square meter facility. The company's Chinese partner, the Chengdu Municipality, had at the time boasted of investments into the fab peaking at $10 billion. The two had also announced $2 billion in initial design wins.

GloFo's announcement to cease operations and possibly withdraw from Chengdu comes hot on the heals of a separate announcement bolstering its mainland US based facilities up to US-DoD specs for secure manufacturing, a sign that the company will scale up investment into US-based facilities. GloFo's foreshadowed withdrawal from manufacturing in China is part of the ongoing "tech war" between the US and China, with the US getting American (and West-aligned) tech companies to pull manufacturing out of China, the biggest casualties of which is Huawei.

Toshiba and its strategic ally Western Digital are readying a high-density 128-layer 3D NAND flash memory. In Toshiba's nomenclature, the chip will be named BiCS-5. Interestingly, despite the spatial density, the chip will implement TLC (3 bits per cell), and not the newer QLC (4 bits per cell). This is probably because NAND flash makers are still spooked about the low yields of QLC chips. Regardless, the chip has a data density of 512 Gb. With 33% more capacity than 96-layer chips, the new 128-layer chips could hit commercial production in 2020-21.

The BiCS-5 chip reportedly features a 4-plane design. Its die is divided into four sections, or planes, which can each be independently accessed; as opposed to BiCS-4 chips that use a 2-plane layout. This reportedly doubles the write performance per unit-channel to 132 MB/s from 66 MB/s. The die also reportedly uses CuA (circuitry under array), a design innovation in which logic circuitry is located in the bottom-most "layer," with data layers stacked above, resulting in 15 percent die-size savings. Aaron Rakers, a high-technology industry market analyst with Wells Fargo, estimates that Toshiba-WD's yields per 300 mm wafer could be as high as 85 percent.

TSMC's Fab 14 B has been affected with a chemical contamination that has put a considerable number of wafers in suspend mode. Fab 14 B essentially produces 12 and 16 nm, 300 mm wafers for 14 companies, including NVIDIA, MEDIATEK, Huawei and Hisilicon. Reportedly, between 10,000 and 30,000 wafers have been affected (though not scrapped, so there might be salvageable bits and pieces here and there). Of course, every wafer will have to go through a thorough certification process, and the fab will have to go down for the company to purge any remains of these botched chemical compounds.

To put things into perspective, though, Fab 14 B is one of TSMC's Gigafabs, which have a rated monthly output of 100k wafers - so production worth between three and ten days could be affected already, with the additional downtime accruing lost potential fabrication. This event isn't expected to significantly affect availability of any of the products for any of the companies, but these are becoming, at the very least, late inventory - this could well play into some speculative increases in pricing from some players in the market.

Silicon wafers are definitely the best kind of wafers for us tech enthusiasts, but as we all know, required financial resources for the development and production of these is among the most intensive in development costs and R&D. It's not just about the cost of employing enough (and crucially, good enough) engineers that can employ the right tools and knowledge to design the processing miracles that are etched onto wafers; there's also the cost of good, old production as well. Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography Systems that are used for the production of silicon wafers are about the size of a city bus, and typically cost more than 100 million euros ($115.3 million) each. ASML, a Dutch company that specializes in this kind of equipment, announced this year it was expecting to see a 25% revenue growth for 2017. Increased demand for these systems - and added cost of development of ever increasingly small and complex etchings in wafers - means this sector is seeing strong growth. But where there is strong growth, there is usually high demand, and high demand means higher strain on supply, which may sometimes not be able to keep up with the market's needs.

This is seemingly the case for wafer pricing; as demand for wafer production has been increasing, so to are prices. Faced with increased demand, companies are usually faced with a tough question to answer in regards to the correct course of action. Usually, it goes like this: higher demand at the same supply level means higher pricing. However, if supply isn't enough to satisfy demand, manufacturers are losing out on potential increased sales. This leads most companies to increase supply relative to demand, but always with lower projected output than demand requires, so they can bask in both increased ASP (Average Sale Price) and higher number of sales. This has been the case with DRAM memory production for some time now: and is happening with 300 mm silicon wafers as well.