Editor's Page

Silicorn prairie

Amid the gently rolling Indiana landscape and its endless seas of cornfields lies one of the granddaddies of all semiconductor manufacturing facilities, Delphi Delco Electronic Systems' Fab III in Kokomo. When it was completed in 1985, the fab was, at 60,000 square feet, the largest cleanroom of its kind in the world. The 5-inch, 1.2-µm facility supplies most of the chips for General Motors cars, running a mix of CMOS, DMOS, bipolar, and power processes and producing close to a million integrated circuits per day.

During my recent Midwest swing I visited the sprawling Delphi campus and found out that plans are in the works to upgrade Fab III to an 8-inch, 0.8-µm-or-better line. My tour guides, John Weaver, Dave Swinehart, and Gil Porter, explained many design elements of the plant that were ahead of their time and, in some cases, remain state-of-the-art features. One impressive feature is the amount of what Weaver calls "human engineering" that went into the fab. The entire cleanroom is enclosed in glass, allowing workers to see outside from almost anywhere. "You can be all the way to the other end of the fab and watch the traffic go by when you look down the aisle," smiles Swinehart. Earth-toned lounge areas with potted plants and ample natural light lie just outside the double-walled clean areas, providing a striking counterbalance to the inherent sterility of the Class 10 room. Contrast this with the stark working conditions in many fabs, where little or no consideration has been given to employee comfort and morale.

The fab was originally designed for the future, explains Weaver. "We knew this was going to be here awhile [so] we have it set up so that we can upgrade very easily... it's all done in a modular way." The ease of access and layout of the physical plant, vibration isolation of the cleanroom from the rest of the facility, and logical product flow concept all should contribute to a less-painful transition to 8-inch processing.

One of the critical focus areas at Fab III is defect reduction. Company veteran Joe Hawkins has been brought in from yield analysis to oversee the efforts. "We've moved up the priority to reduce defects in the fab as we try and get ready for the 8-inch projects and the smaller geometries," he says. "Being in the yield end of it for years I understand what the impact of defects are.... When we go down to the next step, we're going to find a lot of stuff that we knew about but didn't realize how much it was impacting us." As part of Delphi Delco's efforts to be a competitive player in the merchant side of the business, Hawkins sees a deepening relationship with their equipment and materials vendors, although he says "we want to cure some of our in-house stuff first... and then let's pull in some experts."

People wowed by chips sporting the smallest of design rules would be wise to consider the high level of reliability required for devices destined for the automotive industry. "You have to build chips that when somebody hooks up their jumper cables backward to jump their car and puts reverse voltage on everything, it doesn't blow out the whole system," Weaver points out. "If you put the wrong voltage on a PC, you're most likely buying a new PC. We don't do that to people in cars." After all, notes Porter, the most complex consumer electronics product the average person deals with daily is his or her automobile.

Maybe it's time to replace the term motorhead with circuithead.

Tom Cheyney
Editor

tom.cheyney@cancom.com

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