TABLE OF CONTENTS Krishna Seshan
The size, importance, and the economic impact of the semiconductor industry have undergone a sea change in recent years. The role of equipment has been the fuel for this change. New processing steps have become necessary, old ones have become cleaner, greener and more sophisticated. Everything has become much cleaner and more expensive; it is common for pieces of equipment to cost multiple millions of dollars. The result is a new manufacturing environment for the industry.
Graphs and tables in this section quantify that semiconductor fabricators generate large revenues, but their manufacturing costs have also become very large. This increase in equipment cost is driven by the need for very clean fabricators and processing steps. The connections between feature size, contamination control, and cost are discussed below.
The graph in Fig. 1 shows a breakdown of the cost of device fabrication into equipment and land/building costs. It is clear that the equipment component of cost is now the major contributor. Notice the increase as the industry moves to 12" wafers.
The growth of the semiconductor industry and the sales of processing equipment are related as shown in Fig. 2.
The graphs above make the following three points:
Costs of device fabrication have increased.
