Out with the old, in with the new

摘要

Industry professionals who spent the first half of their careers designing and building "state-of-the-art" semiconductor fabs will now spend their autumn years trying to figure out how to tear the darn things down. The transition to the highly-productive 300 mm fab, coupled with the growing age of our existing facilities, will bring us to a point in the next few years where we may see more facilities decommissioned than constructed. Business conditions will lead manufacturers to shut down process lines, either abandoning certain products altogether, or relocating them overseas. Some facilities may be so outdated that they will be abandoned, sold to another manufacturer or converted for a different use. Unlike facility construction, a discipline in which we've had three decades to hone our skills, decommissioning a facility is a whole new ballgame.