The chipmakers hope to take advantage of APC's real-time monitoring capabilities to reduce the impact of yield-killing errors in expensive 300-mm processes. The jointly run Singapore fab, Au Pte., is scheduled to begin production in 2005. UMC also plans to use the new technology at its Fab 12A in Tainan, Taiwan.

AMD has considerable experience with the technology, having begun using it in 1996 for high-volume production at Fab 25 in Austin, TX. In addition, the chipmaker's Fab 30 plant in Dresden, Germany, features APC-based processes that combine real-time closed-loop control and run-to-run control to minimize process drift. The technology's ability to detect and classify faults acts as a warning to shut down process equipment before significant damage can occur to yields, AMD points out.

UMC says its foundry operations have led the world in the adoption of 300-mm fab automation. "By leveraging our combined manufacturing expertise, we can accelerate the proliferation of advanced control technologies required for automated wafer fabrication," says Chris Chi, senior vice president of fab operations and president of UMC. A primary goal of the collaboration is establishing a new standard for automated wafer fabrication, Chi points out.

The partners will put together a budget for their collaboration next year, says Tom Sonderman, director of advanced process control for AMD in Austin. The companies plan to work together "immediately" in Tainan, he notes. That work will be transferred to the Singapore joint venture.

The budget for the joint effort "encapsulates a lot of things," Sonderman emphasizes. In particular, the APC infrastructure encompasses several elements, including manufacturing execution systems. "There's a lot of peripheral infrastructure that allows the tools in the fab to provide the necessary information for control. What rides on top of that is our APC framework together with technology provided by KLA-Tencor through its product called Catalyst, plus the cost of putting all that in place."

For a typical 200-mm fab, the cost of installing APC technology "is in the $3 million range," Sonderman says. An APC setup for a 300-mm factory "is some percentage higher than that."

AMD requires "APC-enabled functionality" on critical tool sets from manufacturers such as Applied Materials and Novellus, he notes. Key functions are data acquisition and dynamic recipe management, "which means you have to be able to modify the recipe at the tool level on a lot-by-lot—or for 300-mm [processing]—a wafer-by-wafer basis." Most equipment suppliers offer that functionality, Sonderman says, but he adds, "a lot of the debate from the standards point of view involves the right way to do it.'"

The software used with the APC hardware holds equal importance. Sonderman says AMD has an APC-baseline technology, "which is a configured version of the Catalyst product I mentioned. Over time, AMD has built more capability into that control system." As for the software, the chipmaker faces decisions on "what to bring back into our commercial products." AMD distributes the outcome through a "third-party–slash–internal-development strategy."

Sonderman offers two examples of how AMD's manufacturing benefits from APC technology. One has to do with drive-current control for microprocessor performance. "We use a very complicated gate CD process that takes information from the photo-step and postphoto metrology and etch-step and postetch metrology, [and] pulls all this together in a complex algorithm to tune the etcher and the stepper in order to achieve the desired target that allows us to maximize the...speed grade of the microprocessor.

"Another example is in the fault-detection of the rapid thermal anneal process, one of the few processing areas where you don't have a physical measurement you can make," he continues. "It's an off-line measurement. Multivariate fault detection can be used to assess the tool health on a lot-by-lot basis. After each lot we determine whether or not the tool ran as it should. It's kind of like a virtual sensor."

Sonderman says there are two ways to think about the partners' expressed goal of setting the pace in 300-mm APC technology. "We want to come up with a standard infrastructure for doing control in a 300-mm facilty. For AMD that is less important than it is for UMC, which plans on building many 300-mm fabs. What they want to do is to replicate that [APC capability]." AMD wants to "establish a highly automated facility...and all the associated infrastructure and communication protocols so that our solution can then become the de facto standard."

Sonderman puts AMD's quest to lead the pack in another way. "We like to say we don't want to become beta in a VHS world."