MICROFacility Report (March 2001)

Huge crates containing semiconductor capital equipment may look curiously out of place standing in a parking lot in the midst of a dusty construction site. Likewise, the clanking of hammers and the din of drills may not be ordinary sounds emanating from behind the walls and windows of a Class 1 cleanroom. But such were the sights and sounds at toured the German semiconductor manufacturing facility. Located in Freiburg—a small city in southwestern Germany known more for its splendid medieval cathedral than a state-of-the-art IC fab—the Micronas site manufactures digital video and audio signal processors, customized embedded controllers, and interface components. While 70% of the fab's output is devoted to the manufacture of chips for use in consumer electronics and multimedia products, 30% is spent on the production of chips for the increasingly important field of automotive electronics. Late last year, the company acquired the image and video consumer electronics operations of Infineon, the huge chipmaker headquartered in Munich, Germany. The purchase is expected to expand Micronas's expertise in the audiovisual field. The company's manufacturing techniques may not represent the cutting edge of semiconductor technology; it is not planning to shift to copper dual-damascene structures, 0.18-µm and smaller linewidths, and 300-mm wafers. But it doesn't need to. The company is the world's largest producer of MP3 products and operates one of the few IC fabs to produce the chips necessary to drive the WorldSpace satellites; both of these types of products can rely on aluminum interconnect technologies and conventional wafer sizes. This report focuses on the construction of Micronas's new fab module at the company's Freiburg facility. The firm's concepts of erecting fully independent fab modules, organizing cleanroom space flexibly, and arranging process baays so that operators can perform multiple tasks in compact areas have enabled the fab to continue manufacturing