AMD Launches Two New APM Innovation Centers For 300mm Technology

April 28, 2004

AMD announced today that it has formally opened two new Automated Precision Manufacturing (APM) Innovation Centers located in Austin, Texas and Dresden, Germany. APM is AMD’s patented suite of more than 250 leading-edge fab automation and optimization technologies used to reduce time-to-yield on new technologies and decrease manufacturing costs.

The new centers will be used by AMD manufacturing technologists and software designers to integrate the next generation of APM, version 3.0, into AMD Fab 36, the company’s 300 millimeter (mm) wafer manufacturing facility currently under construction in Dresden.
The current generation of APM, version 2.0, is tailored to the unique requirements of 200mm manufacturing and is now in full operation at AMD Fab 30 and FASL LLC Fab 25. In AMD Fab 30, APM 2.0 today acts as a kind of “central nervous system” by forming an integrated fabric of communication and control linkages with the hundreds of tools throughout the fab. This sophisticated and highly integrated manufacturing infrastructure constantly monitors the health of microprocessors in production by collecting and analyzing data from the tool sets as wafers enter and exit them for processing.
Using this real-time data analysis, APM automatically and consistently recommends modifications to the routing of wafer groups through the fab, as well as changes to the recipes used within each tool, to optimize the resulting chips’ performance.
APM 3.0 will serve a similar role in AMD Fab 36, but with increased precision, greater integration and added levels of automation beyond those currently found in APM 2.0.

Source: http://www.amd.com