Massive tools
Walking around the clean room and seeing the sheer number of breath-takingly expensive bits of kit required to make a semiconductor wafer, was a sharp reminder of why so few companies can afford to keep their own fabs these days.
Pretty much all the kit was still labelled ‘AMD', even though it has all been owned by GlobalFoundries for most of this year. We were assured that each tool cost millions and often tens of millions to buy and that there are over 800 of them. Suddenly the claim that it costs five billion dollars to make and equip a fab took on real meaning.
The wafers themselves are transported between all these tools by an army of rail-mounted boxes, which scurry about the ceiling of the cleanroom like robotic sheep-dogs. They extend arms downwards to retrieve or deposit black pods, each apparently containing around ten wafers. Even in the cleanroom, the wafers always reside in these pods when they're not actually inside a tool being...fabbed.
The really expensive kit is found in the lithography zone of the cleanroom, where yellow lighting is used in order to not interfere with the lithography process.
We had one last photo opportunity at the end of the cleanroom tour. From the left we have GlobalFoundries head of communications Jon Carvill, Fudo, me, and the alpine ninja on the right is our own Paul Dutton.
