Fabs have been getting bigger for a while, but to build, and equip, an 80,000 300mm wafer a month fab, as Toshiba and SanDisk have just done, is truly awesome, especially when it’s dedicated to one product: NAND flash.
It takes you back to the days when semiconductor CEOs bet the company when they built a fab.
In fact Toshiba’s CEO Atsutoshi Nishida actually said, at the opening, that it is a factory: “On which our company is betting its future”.
Gordon Moore would approve: “It’s a peculiar business”, he once said, “the only sane strategy is to bet the company regularly.”
Interestingly, it was Toshiba which invented flash memory, but Intel which was first to recognise its potential and put the first flash chip, the 28F256, on the market.
Opportunistic CEOs used to make those snap bets in those days. Nowadays there are few CEOs with the courage to do so.
But clearly Toshiba, which has emerged as the pre-eminent Japanese semiconductor company, has confidence in flash, in its ability to scale it, mass-produce it, find new applications for it and out-market Samsung.
Nishida said Toshiba would out-sell Samsung in NAND flash next year – a ballsy forecast when Samsung currently has 45 per cent of the world market and Toshiba 27 per cent.
To make such a forecast, and back it with an 80,000 wafer a month fab, takes a lot of guts. Putting that many more wafers out into the market is an act of faith.
Toshiba says it has built the fab so it can be enlarged to over 200,000 wafers a month, and is planning another new fab for NAND flash to start ramping in 2009.
Awesome.
David, what fab are you referring to in your headline with 80kwpm of 300mm wafers?
Toshiba/Sandisk's Fab 3 at Yokkaichi is already in full production at 150kwpm of 300mm wafers producing 8Gb and 16Gb MLC nand flash and they have already started production at Fab 4 which will have a maximum capacity of 210kwpm (which let me assure you will exceed 250kwpm as they keep revising the output numbers upwards) of nand flash when they ramp-up completely by sometime in 2009!
-Pam
When I saw Shozo Saito in September he told me that the intention for Fab 4 was to be running 80Kwpm in the second half of 2008. I notice other journals like EETimes and Semiconductor News have reported the same figure