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The fab will eventually be upgraded. I design semiconductors and I have worked at two companies that had their own fabs (I didn't work in the fab) Back in 199

The fab will eventually be upgraded. I design semiconductors and I have worked at two companies that had their own fabs (I didn't work in the fab) Back in 1997 the new technology was 0.25 micron (250nm) but we still operated fabs at 0.35, 0.6, 0.8, and 1 micron. I believe these 4 lines operated at 6 different factories. The next year we shut down the 1 micron fab. The building itself still had all the air filtering and cleanroom facilities. The old equipment (steppers, testers) was removed and new equipment for 0.18 micron was installed. I think this took about a year. At the end we still had 6 factories but the building that used to have all the old stuff was now the cutting edge fab.

bobsmooth 6y ago
What happens to the old equipment? Scrap?
- peterburkimsher 6y ago
  Usually the equipment is rented, and returned to the owners. I spent 4 years in Taiwan working for OSE, a semiconductor packaging company (cutting up silicon wafers, bonding wires onto them, and putting them into little plastic SD cards or RAM chips labelled "Made in Taiwan"). The pick & place machines and ovens weren't owned by OSE - they were on a 30-year lease from other companies in Japan, Germany, etc. Software updates would void the warranty/lease conditions. One of my tasks was to write a program to measure yields for factory monitoring. This meant figuring out how to use SQL on Windows 2000, with no .NET framework or additional libraries. My guess is that when the equipment is too old, the original owners either take them back for salvaging, or sell off the pieces as scrap. I went to many scrapyards in Kaohsiung though, and found many treasures like $10 bicycles or old consumer gadgets, but no factory-level machines.