AMD Saxony 300mm Semiconductor

East view of AMD's future 300mm fab in Dresden.

North view of AMD's future 300mm fab in Dresden.

AMD is increasing production at Dresden to cope with extra demand; Sun Microsystems has for example recently chosen the AMD Opteron™ processor.

The new facility is next to AMD's Fab 30.

AMD's Dresden site is already one of the most important industrial sites in eastern Germany.

Etch tool hookup at Fab 30.

Litho area at Fab 30.

AMD's Athlon™ microprocessor is produced in Dresden.

AMD’s 300mm 65nm fab in Dresden, Germany, is one of Europe’s largest semiconductor manufacturing facilities. The new facility is located next to AMD’s existing main microprocessor fab, Fab 30.

The new fab cost around $2.5 billion over four years, with external financing and government support of around $1.5 billion. This was thought to include up to about $700 million in loans from a bank consortium, about $300 million from a group of investors led by M+W Zander and about $500 million in government grants. In February 2004, the EU Commission approved the government investment aid. The Federal Republic of Germany and the Free State of Saxony provided investment allowances and investment grants of up to approximately €545 million – the highest benefit possible under the grants and subsidy program.

AMD broke ground at the fab in November 2003. The building was completed in 2005, and the company began to install equipment shortly before then. Qualification began in the second half of 2005, and operation in 2006. The fab should reach full capacity in 2007. It is generating over 1,000 jobs directly, mostly skilled engineers and technicians, and an additional 1,000 jobs in the region. AMD now collectively employs approximately 2,500 people in its AMD Fab 30 and AMD Fab 36 semiconductor facilities and the Dresden Design Center, AMD’s product development group in Europe.

FUTURE GENERATIONS OF AMD CPU

The success of AMD64 processors prompted AMD to expand its manufacturing operations. The company has also been increasing its presence in the enterprise computing market, with Sun for example having adopted the AMD Opteron™ processor.

Fab 36 will produce future generations of AMD products using its third-generation Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM 3.0) manufacturing techniques. AMD and IBM are developing 65nm processes together, and the fab will be nearly identical to the 65nm equipment installed in IBM’s East Fishkill fab in New York. The initial capacity of the fab was around 13,000 wafers per month, and this can be expanded to 20,000 wafers per month. AMD can make chips for other companies to ensure full utilization.

DRESDEN BUILDS MICROPROCESSORS

AMD has been one of the largest international investors in Germany since the mid-1990s. AMD’s Dresden site includes both AMD Saxony LLC & Co. KG and AMD Fab 36 LLC & Co. KG. Total investment is expected to exceed $ 4.7 billion by 2007. AMD Saxony represents one of the largest US projects in East Germany, with total investment of $2.5 billion by 2003. Before re-unification Dresden was part of East Germany, and unemployment has been high.

Located on 100 acres of land close to the Dresden airport and federal highways, Fab 30 is already one of the most important industrial sites in eastern Germany. Commercial production of the AMD Athlon microprocessor started there in June 2000, since when tens of millions of Athlon die have been shipped. Fab 30 reached full build-out by the end of 2001. Since then, it has produced about 5,000 wafers per week. Currently, AMD Fab 30 is manufacturing the seventh-generation family of Athlon processors and the eighth-generation families of AMD Opteron and AMD Athlon 64 processors. In Q2 of 2005, AMD Fab 30 started customer shipments of AMD Dual Core Processors.

Fab 30 was the world’s first facility designed to produce microprocessors with copper interconnects. After extensive reconstruction, Fab 30’s SMIF cleanroom now measures more than 11,000m². An additional cleanroom expansion project increased the total production and development area to more than 14,000m² in 2003.

Fab30 was upgraded to 90nm early in 2004 using copper interconnect and ‘Black Diamond’ low-k technology. It is will also processing SOI devices using Soitec wafers and strained-silicon technology. Production of processors began in April 2004, with commercial production in the summer and availability in the second half of the year.

DRESDEN DESIGN CENTRE (DDC)

The Dresden Design Centre (DDC) is AMD’s development centre in Europe. It focuses on developing chipset ICs for future generation PC platforms. The feature set of those chipset ICs includes a dedicated high-speed bus for data transfers to and from the CPU. This HyperTransport™ technology was developed by AMD and has been standardized for other companies working on PC platform infrastructure. Another core task of the DDC is to develop and integrate advanced communication interfaces to other AMD semiconductor products.

AMD designs and produces microprocessors, Flash memory devices and system-on-chip solutions for computing, communications and consumer electronics. Founded in 1969, AMD is a Standard & Poor’s 500 company with global operations and manufacturing facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia.

The fab is part of AMD Saxony Limited Liability Company & Co. KG (AMD Saxony), a wholly owned subsidiary of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.