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Hynix, Micron Execs Doubt Need for 450 mm Wafers
November 12, 2007
Resistance to the 450 mm wafer generation was evident at last week’s International Trade Partners Conference in Hawaii. During a grand finale panel discussion on the last day of the conference, Hynix Semiconductor Inc.’s CTO Jin Seog Choi was asked if and/or when he saw 450 mm wafers playing a role.
According to a source at a major equipment company who was in attendance, Choi said that 450 mm wafers would take much longer than anyone imagines, and that Hynix "has no intention to build any 450 mm wafer fabs.”
Choi’s comment brought on a spontaneous round of applause from the audience.
Micron Technology Inc. CEO Steve Appleton made a closing speech at the Maui meeting. Appleton was asked the same 450 mm question, and the Micron CEO said “we can all do the math, and it doesn't justify the enormous 450 mm investment," the source said. Appleton said he also doubts 450 mm will ever be a reality, a remark that elicited even more boisterous applause, the source added.
The Hynix and Micron comments run counter to any argument that high-volume memory manufacturers in particular would see economic benefits from processing the bigger platters. Even these large commodity IC manufacturers shrink from the cost projections for 450 mm factories. AMD, IBM, Qimonda, and others are in the same boat: big enough to have their own 300 mm fabs but not large enough to justify a 450 mm fab that is perhaps twice as expensive as today’s 300 mm fabs.
One scenario is that the four companies -- Intel, Samsung, Toshiba, and TSMC -- which appear to be in favor of the 450 mm transition could muscle their suppliers to develop 450 mm tools. That might allow the fast followers such as Hynix and Micron to draft behind, or be forced to buy 450 mm tools if they wanted to move to the latest technology node.
It is unlikely that the tool makers would be able to afford 32 nm or 22 nm toolsets for both wafer sizes, 300 mm and 450 mm.
The 450 mm generation makes some sense if demand for Nand chips, for example, grows as fast as it has the past few years. That makes the remarks at the Maui meeting by the executives from Hynix and Micron – two hard chargers in the NAND camp -- noteworthy indeed.
Posted by David Lammers on November 12, 2007 | Comments (0)
