Behind the Closed Doors of AMD's Chip Production

rokali writes "Tom's Hardware is running an article on AMD's chipmaking procedure, plants, and future. Check out the pictures of Fab 36, their new plant slated to open in 2006, which will put of the next generation of 65nm chips. From the article: 'Currently, AMD's devices in Dresden are still produced on 200 mm wafers; the new APM 3.0 using 300 mm wafers won't be ramped up until Fab 36 opens. Production startup at the new facility is slated for the beginning of 2006, at which point the company will have invested an additional $2.5 billion.'"

Re:Question

[Blapto]

The EU will give funding and tax breaks to large inward investment. Computer chip designing is a huge added value system (cheapish raw materials/chip) so it produces a large benefit for the EU. You'll find the same going on in most countries.

New toys aren't cheap

[tofucubes]

better have a big wallet...looks like a lot of geeks will be window shopping... the low-end Opteron 865 chip will cost $1,514 USD dual-core Opteron 870 will run $2,149, with the Opteron 875 priced at $2,649 http://www.betanews.com/article/DualCore_AMD_Opter on_Prices_Leak/1113922595

Re:down the drain

[Anonymous Coward]

did. 3Q 2004. $43.8million net profit.

Re:Question

[Zocalo]

Simple logistics; just as many tech companies congregated in Silicon Valley, a similar situation exists in Dresden. Going from chip design to the actual fabrication requires a considerable amount of support infrastructure much of which is done by external companies. For more complex devices it will typically take a few months at least from finalising the design to the first chips actually rolling out of the fab.

I know for a fact that not even Intel does everything in house, so it's highly unlikely that AMD does. Essentially there are just far too many different types of highly complex technologies and processes involved for one company to do it all. Having as much of that infrastructure located in the same general vicinity can save a lot of time, money and aggravation. Which is why we have manufacturing sites in both Silicon Valley and Dresden, amongst others...

Re:Motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe VIA chipsets are only so fast because they take shortcuts implementing the spec. Besides, a "fast" motherboard is really only 1-3% faster than a "slow" one. Who would care except overclocking shitheads and cheap walmart bastards? (Except, come to think of it, that's most of AMD's customer base.)

Although AMD never got the USB working right on their 751(?) chipset, major reason nobody used it.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[CajunArson]

Opteron 865 chip...
If you want to build a 4/8 way machine (which is the only reason to buy from the 8x series) $1500 is not a bad price for a chip at all, and $2149 for the dual-core is only ~40% markup! If you want cheap.. buy a normal PC, after all the extra CPU's won't make your games faster and many of the server boards that take these chips don't even bother with high-speed graphics ports since they're designed to be servers. Opterons are cheap (err.. inexpensive) compared to Itaniums or other 64 bit architectures out there.

Here's an answer

[SlightlyOldGuy]

They took the photo through a yellow-tinted clean-room window. Taking a camera into a clean room is a lot of work and bother (it has to be, well, cleaned). I think the widows are tinted to prevent UV transmission or something.

Re:Here's a question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason it's yellow is because of the photolithography operations going on there. The yellow light doesn't expose the wafers like the white light does.

Re:Here's a question...

[Zocalo]

If you are talking about a clean room, then it's part of the environmental control. In addition to the usual temperature, humidity and particulate matter controls, you also need to regulate static, ionisation and the lighting. The silicon wafers, the photomasks and other manufacturing devices are incredibly sensitive to all those things at varying stages of production. Basically the design of a chip is projected onto the silicon wafer in a manner kind of like projecting a photographic transparency onto a projection screen, except that the image from the photomask is made smaller rather than larger. The photomasks are quite sensitive to certain wavelengths of light, hence the special lighting requirements.

Besides, once you are cooped up inside one of those natty suits that you have to wear in modern chip fabrication environments, believe me when I say that the lighting is *not* a major concern... I'm certainly not complaining if I don't have to do any work in our clean room environment on a given day. OK, yes, it is *very* cool at first though! ;)

Re:Here's a question...

[El]

It's not yellow. The picture is shot through a window, which has a UV-blocking coating on it. This makes everything appear yellow. Apparently certain frequencies of light are bad for the wafers.

Re:New toys aren't cheap

[greg_barton]

This is FUD. The 865 is not "low end" no matter what the article says. It's the chip that's capable of 8 way SMP, as opposed to the 2 and 1 way. Those are cheaper.

Here [digitimes.com] is the source article for the price leak from DigiTimes. The prices for the 1 and 2 level chips are much less:

165 chip: $637
265 chip: $851

Don't believe the FUD.

Re:down the drain

[Martin Blank]

Quarterly results going back to 1999:

1999 Q1: ($128.4M)
1999 Q2: ($162.0M)
1999 Q3: ($105.5M)
1999 Q4: $65.1M

2000 Q1: $189.3M
2000 Q2: $207.1M
2000 Q3: $408.6M
2000 Q4: $178.0M

2001 Q1: $124.8M
2001 Q2: $17.4M
2001 Q3: ($97.4M)
2001 Q4: ($15.8M)

2002 Q1: ($9.2M)
2002 Q2: ($185.0M)
2002 Q3: ($254.2M)
2002 Q4: ($854.8M)

2003 Q1: ($146.4M)
2003 Q2: ($140.1M)
2003 Q3: ($31.2M)
2003 Q4: $43.2M

2004 Q1: $45.1M
2004 Q2: $32.2M
2004 Q3: $43.9M
2004 Q4: ($30.0M)

2005 Q1: ($17.4M)

At the vert least, 2000 did seem to be a good year for them, and losses (when they have occurred) have been light in the last 18 months.

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

The German government gave AMD large grants.

"AMD said it has secured $700 million from a consortium of banks, and a series of lucrative guarantees and grants from the governments of Germany and Saxony."

http://news.earthweb.com/bus-news/article.php/31 11 941

I think that number has grown to over $1 billion now.

Re:Chipsets would suffice

[Jeff DeMaagd]

It seems the only boards that bothered with AMD chipsets were boards intended for server and workstations.

I think the 8000 series chipsets are still made, but generally are only put in Opteron systems. They had not yet made a PCIe replacement for the 813x chips. I think that update will become necessary in the next year to keep pace in the server market, though PCI-X seems to still be going pretty strong.

Re:Motherboards

[evilviper]

The Intel chip + Intel board is a ridiculously stable combination.

Intel's motherboards are just re-branded Asus motherboards.

So buy an AMD chip and get an Asus motherboard for it. Doesn't take a rocket scientist...

Re:Thunderbirds?

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC, AMD's FAB naming convention refers to the year (relative to AMD's founding) that the FAB opened. So FAB 25 in Austin was built when AMD was 25 years old, FAB 30 in Dresden when AMD was 30 and now FAB 36 when AMD turns 36.

Re:200 & 300 mm???

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the wafers really are that big.

Remember, a great many chips are made from each
wafer (the same pattern, or die, is repeated many times across the wafer surface, which allows for many chips to be made in parallel). They are cut into chips with a saw at the last stage.

Re:Chipsets would suffice

[ajlitt]

AMD still makes chipsets, but they're pretty much never found in desktop configurations. AMD produces chipsets mainly as a platform to help get the chips on the market before third party chipset manufacturers get a design out. Seems that third parties aren't keen on investing in a chipset design without seeing what the part looks like in real life.

Re:Question

[Bender_]

What makes Dresden so interesting to AMD?

Dresden was one of the centers of GDR microelectronics. The GDR was the technolocial leader in microelectronics of the entire east block and the gourvernment poured billions into it. However, COCOM [wikipedia.org] succeeded in keeping them technologically way behing the western countries. Nevertheless, Dresden was the birthplace of Honeckers infamous 1 mbit (scroll down) [cpu-museum.com] chip.

After the reunificiation there was a huge skilled workforce in microelectronics readily available in Dresden. This was, and is, aside from gouvernment incentives a major reason to build fabs there. Siemens (and now Infineon) were the first to take advantage of this. AMD came later.

The fabs have been extremely successful so far. Infineons fab was the first to have mass production on 300mm wafers world wide. AMDs fab managed to ramp the copper/low-k metallization process in record time.

Btw. some of the GDR semiconductor companies still live on in form of ZMD (Dresden), X-FAB (in Erfurt) and the IHP (Frankfurt/Oder). However they mostly specialize in niche products now.

From the Article:
Check out the pictures of Fab 36, their new plant slated to open.

You wish. There is no photo showing the actual production at an AMD site. One photo shows some support level, another photo does actually show the production of an entirely different company.