AMD Opens APC Centers to Develop APM 3.0

In a press conference at SEMICON Europa, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.) announced plans to open two of what it calls "automated precision manufacturing" or APM centers in Austin, Texas, and Dresden, Germany. These centers will focus on the development of advanced process control (APC) technology, using software emulators to mimic equipment behavior.

The company has a patented suite of more than 250 fab automation and optimization technologies used to reduce time-to-yield on new technologies and decrease manufacturing costs, according to AMD's Tom Sonderman. It is this suite that AMD has dubbed APM version 2.0, although Sonderman said there are no plans to sell or license this technology to another IC manufacturer. Described as "automatic decision making technology" and a "central nervous system" for the fab, APM is based on the idea of using APC for automatic tuning and rapid continuous improvement.

The new centers will be used by AMD manufacturing technologists and software designers to integrate the next-generation APM version 3.0 into AMD Fab 36, the company's 300 mm wafer fab currently under construction in Dresden. "This early APM integration effort will allow us to rapidly and efficiently bring fully automated processes online in AMD Fab 36, and will help keep us on schedule," said Gary Heerssen, AMD's group vice president, Corporate Manufacturing Group.

"With our capability, we've been able to stay cost-competitive and performance-competitive with Intel without having to make that investment until the time is right," Sonderman said. "Moving to 300 mm in 2006 is the right timeframe for us." He also suggested that the idea of APM, where subtle changes are made over time, has advantages over Intel's Copy Exact! strategy where big changes are made at one time throughout the organization (Intel now has five 300 mm wafer fabs in operation). "A lot of companies are struggling with going to 300 mm wafers, low-k and copper back end and exotic transistor architectures, all at the same time. That creates a lot of interactions that you can't differentiate very well," Sonderman said.

The APM initiative was started at AMD more than a decade ago. The current generation of APM, version 2.0, is tailored to the unique requirements of 200 mm manufacturing, and is now in full operation at AMD Fab 30 and FASL LLC Fab 25. "Thanks to APM 2.0 and the superior work force in AMD Fab 30, we now ramp our processor products to volume production using a fraction of the silicon wafers required three years ago, even though we have transitioned to a new design and increased the number of transistors threefold to total more than 100 million," Heerssen said. "The work done in these innovation centers is planned to extend and improve these capabilities to further enhance the strong cost benefits of 300 mm production." The Figure shows how AMD was able to reduce the time to mature yield for a new process, although the company declined to specify the timeline involved or how it defined mature yield.

Although AMD did not specify the timeline or the definition of mature yield, the company said new APC technology enabled it to achieve mature yield 66% faster on its latest Opteron microprocessor, which has almost twice as many transistors, built on an SOI substrate.

In AMD Fab 30, APM 2.0 uses real-time data analysis to recommend modifications to the routing of wafer groups through the fab, and changes tool recipes to optimize the resulting chips' performance.

APM 3.0 will serve a similar role in AMD Fab 36, but with increased precision, greater integration, and added levels of automation beyond those currently found in APM 2.0. Efficiency and precision improvements in APM 3.0 will be primarily targeted at three key areas:

• Wafer-Level Control — Increased level of precise control allowing recipe adjustments for each individual wafer, rather than groups of wafers.
• In-Line Yield Prediction — Increased granularity of defect management for more rapid yield learning.
• Active Scheduling — Intelligent wafer transport containers, integrated into the APM communications fabric, automatically decide which path to take through the fab for optimum processing of the wafers they contain.