GlobalWafers Scores $400 Million To Help Build First 300mm Wafer Plants In US (theregister.com) 17
Matthew Connatser reports via The Register: US government is granting GlobalWafers up to $400 million in CHIPS Act cash to help fund its 300mm wafer manufacturing facilities in Texas and Missouri. The Commerce Department said GlobalWafers' Texas plant is a significant milestone for the US as it's the country's first facility for manufacturing 300mm wafers, the kind that are used for modern processes. The Missouri site will produce a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) variant of 300mm wafers, which are more geared towards defense and aerospace applications where chips need to be less prone to failure. Plans to build the Texas wafer plant were first revealed just over two years ago by the Taiwanese chip biz. It was an alternative use of a few billion dollars that were originally earmarked for acquiring German wafer maker Siltronic, an acquisition which didn't go as hoped due to resistance from German regulators.
The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.
The Missouri plant meanwhile was announced in 2021 as a partnership between GlobalWafers and GlobalFoundries, the chip fab spun off from AMD that now focuses on older nodes rather than the cutting edge. This fab seems to be the smaller of the two, considering that its budget when first announced was just $800 million, and that seems to also cover an expansion of a 200mm SOI wafer plant. In total, GlobalWafers' Texas and Missouri factories will cost around four billion dollars, which means the maximum award funded by the CHIPS Act would cover up to ten percent of the budget. The Commerce Department claims that facilities will create 1,700 jobs in construction and 880 in manufacturing.
Missing details (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Missing details (Score:4, Informative)
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You are correct. A subtle related question though is: what process node are they suitable for? A 180-nm process, for instance, can utilize a wafer with more defects than a 5-nm process.
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Ugh, 300mm? (Score:2)
The US is falling behind. ENIAC makes that look high tech.
Micron already has 300mm wafer sites in the US (Score:2)
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Micron has facilities (fabs) that perform lithography on 300-mm wafers. Lots of companies do. The facility you linked to is getting its raw wafers from...somewhere else overseas.
This news article is noteworthy because this is a new facility for making the blank 300-mm wafers that then go the fabs. That is: it'll be taking (or making?) silicon ingots and slicing them, then flattening, polishing, and producing the buried insulator la
Re: Micron already has 300mm wafer sites in the US (Score:2)
Uhhhh (Score:2)
I think they mean 300nm. 300mm is, like, a transistor the size of a guinea pig.
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African or European guinea pig?
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I..don't know! AAAaaaaahhh....
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Not the size of transistor. They're making blank silicon plates for foundries to make chips out of. The whole plates are 300mm large.
What an absolute fiddle (Score:5, Insightful)
The US taxpayers should be absolutely furious about this.
US Semiconductor companies were quite happy to offshore their production to Asia and China thus decimating their US Capacity and knowledge base. Even the plants they had in Europe were gutted.
Now the winds have changed they are going cap in hand to the Federal Government for immense sums of money to reinstate the same production capacity in the US again.
They really have treated people as absolute mugs.
300 mm? (Score:2)
300 mm? What's that in normal units, like inches?
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Well, 254mm would be ten inches, so just short of a foot, which isn't a normal unit for wafers.