Industry Expert Blogs

Last week I attended the SPIE Advanced Technology Conference. There were a lot of interesting papers and as is always the case at these conferences, there was a lot of interesting things to learn from talking to other attendees on the conference floor.

The first interesting information from the conference floor was that 450mm is being pushed out. What I heard is that with low fab utilization and the empty fab 42 shell, Intel has pulled all of their resources off of 450mm. Intel was one of the key players pushing 450mm and the comments I heard were 450mm won’t be this decade with 2023 as the new introduction date for high volume manufacturing. Some equipment companies appear to be putting 450mm equipment development on hold.