TSMC Affords a Peek at ‘International Gigafab’ Course of Replication Program

At its European Expertise Symposium final week TSMC revealed a few of the particulars about its International Gigafab Manufacturing program, the corporate’s technique to duplicate its manufacturing processes throughout its a number of gigafab websites.

The necessity for large-scale multi-national fabs to have a course of in place to duplicate their amenities is well-documented at this level. As scaling-up at on the gigafab measurement means scaling-out as a substitute, chip makers want to have the ability to shortly get new and up to date manufacturing processes ported to different amenities so as to hit their mandatory throughput – and to keep away from a multi-quarter bottlenecks that come from having to freshly-tune a fab.

Intel, for his or her half, has a widely known Copy Precisely program, which is without doubt one of the firm’s main aggressive benefits, permitting it to share course of recipes throughout its fabs all over the world to maximise yields and cut back efficiency variability. In the meantime, as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is constructing further capability in several components of the world, it has reached the purpose the place it wants an identical program so as to shortly maximize its yields and productiveness at its new fabs in Japan and the U.S. And in some respects, TSMC’s program goes even additional than Intel’s, with a further concentrate on sustainability and social accountability.

“As talked about ultimately yr’s symposium, [Global Gigafab manufacturing] is a robust international manufacturing and administration platform,” mentioned Y.L. Wang, Vice President of Fab Operations TSMC. “We realise one fab administration to make sure our Gigafab to realize constant operation effectivity in addition to manufacturing high quality on a worldwide scale. Furthermore, we additionally pursue sustainability throughout our international footprint overlaying inexperienced manufacturing, international expertise improvement, provide chain localization, in addition to social accountability.”

Relating to enhancements of course of expertise, there are two important mechanisms: the continual course of enhancements (CPI) to enhance yields, in addition to statistical course of management (SPC) cut back efficiency variations. To take action, the corporate has a number of inner strategies that depend on machine learning-based course of management, fixed high quality measuring, and varied productiveness bettering strategies. With International Gigafab manufacturing TSMC can use CPI and SPC to enhance yields and efficiency on the worldwide scale by sharing information between completely different websites.

“Once we port a expertise from Taiwan to Arizona, the fab arrange, the method management system, the whole lot is definitely a duplicate from Taiwan,” mentioned Kevin Zhang, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Growth and Abroad Operations Workplace, and Deputy Co-COO at TSMC.

TSMC but has to start out making chips at its fabs in Germany, Japan, and the USA, so it stays to be seen how briskly the foundry will enhance yields to Taiwanese ranges at its Fab 23 (in Kumamoto, Japan) and Fab 21 (in Arizona) after they start operations in 2024 and 2025, however with International Gigafab Manufacturing program in place, that is probably set to occur slightly ahead of later.