Fabs require many expensive devices to function. Estimates put the cost of building a new fab over one
billion U.S. dollars with values as high as $3–4 billion not being uncommon.
TSMC invested $9.3 billion in its
Fab15 300 mm
wafer manufacturing facility in Taiwan.
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The central part of a fab is the
clean room, an area where the environment is controlled to eliminate all dust, since even a single speck can ruin a microcircuit, which has features much smaller than dust. The clean room must also be damped against vibration and kept within narrow bands of temperature and humidity. Controlling temperature and humidity is critical for minimizing static electricity.
The clean room contains the
steppers for
photolithography,
etching, cleaning,
doping and
dicing machines. All these devices are extremely precise and thus extremely expensive. Prices for most common pieces of equipment for the processing of 300 mm wafers range from $700,000 to upwards of $4,000,000 each with a few pieces of equipment reaching as high as $50,000,000 each (e.g. steppers). A typical fab will have several hundred equipment items.
