THE MOST IMPORTANT announcement from SemiCon West was a subtle statement from Global Foundries about tools. Putting some bits together, it is pretty clear that the company is going to use EUV lithography at the 15nm node.
Greg Bartlett, Senior VP, Process Technology and Research & Development at Global Foundries said as much in several off handed statements. The first was that the company will be putting in EUV litho tools as soon as the Fab 8 building in New York can take equipment. That would be 2H 2012 or so, coincidentally about the time that ASML starts delivering their production EUV tools.
Because of AMD and GloFo’s early work with the Alpha EUV tools, they can skip a lot of the pre-production parts and go directly to the production ramp. The next thing Mr. Bartlett said was that production with EUV would happen during 2015. Since GloFo will be making 32/28nm parts in late 2010 or early 2011, that would put 22nm two years out, and 15nm two years after that.
2011 + 4 = 2015. Imagine that coincidence. The next question is what diameter the wafers will be, but that part was not mentioned, directly or not. In any case, all those debates about EUV’s readiness were just ended. Officially.S|A
Charlie Demerjian
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