The 300-mm (12-inch) wafers are being fabricated in a pilot line located inside TSMC's Fab 6 plant, which opened earlier this year in the southern Taiwan city of Tainan (see March 30 story). The 300-mm pilot line began running wafers with customer designs in November, said TSMC officials.

The company has identified two foundry customers--Altera Corp. of San Jose and Brilliance Semiconductor Inc. of Taiwan--as being among the first customers to have products fabricated on the large-diameter wafers. Altera's products are programmable logic devices and BSI's devices are low-power SRAMs for portable applications.

TSMC opened Fab 6 this year as the company's last 200-mm wafer production plant. It also includes TSMC's first 300-mm pilot line. When fully equipped, the pilot line will be capable of processing 4,500 wafer a month--which is equivalent to 10,000 eight-inch (200-mm) wafers. "That's almost one-third of a fully equipped 8-inch production fab," noted Sheldon Wu, senior director of TSMC's field technical support organization in North America, based in San Jose.

In Taiwan, TSMC officials said the 200-mm fab generation is reaching its limits, in terms of production yields and throughput. "The move to 300-mm manufacturing opens up more room for improvement, ultimately resulting in higher yields, higher volumes, and higher product quality for our customers," said F.C. Tseng, president of TSMC.

The larger wafer diameter enables higher yields at the same defect density as today's standard 200-mm wafers, said TSMC officials. "We believe that, with a surface area 2.25 times larger than its 200-mm predecessor, and capable of even higher yields, the 300-mm wafer will become the workhorse technology of the IC industry," noted N.S. Tsai, senior director of TSMC's 300-mm project.

TSMC said it is now taping out designs for multiple customers, which will use wafers fabricated in the Fab 6 pilot line. A company spokesman in San Jose would not identify the other customers or the types of products to be made in the pilot line. TSMC is aiming to finish processing of the first products on 300-mm by the end of the year, said the company spokesman.

To quickly ramp customer products on the larger wafers, TSMC used a JEDEC-compliant 300-mm test chip, which contains a variety of standard test patterns, standard cells, circuits, and functions. These test chips have been rigorously tested and analyzed to ensure products will ramp into production with the highest yields possible, said the company spokesman in San Jose.

TSMC is using a mature 0.18-micron process technology to start customer production on the 300-mm substrates, Wu said. "It is only logical that we start the new manufacturing paradigm with a well characterized and full-production technology," he added.

To increase its 300-mm wafer volumes, TSMC is now plans in December to begin installing a cleanroom in Fab 12--the company's first high-volume 12-inch facility, which is located Hsinchu. The schedule for the Fab 12 facility has been moved up and it is now expected to begin processing wafers in the fourth quarter of 2001, Wu said. The facility will have the capacity to process 25,000 wafers per month.

TSMC is also constructing its second high-volume 300-mm fab in Tainan's Science-Based Industrial Park. Fab 14's cleanroom is now slated to be installed in the second quarter of 2001, and first production is expected to start in early 2002, Wu said. The full capacity of this fab will be 30,000 wafers a month.

Earlier this month, TSMC's board approved the start of construction on the company's third volume 300-mm plant, called Fab 15, which will be build in Tainan (see Nov. 7 story). Construction on Fab 15 will begin before the end of this year, but no other information is available about the timing of its production ramp, said a TSMC spokesman in San Jose.

--J. Robert Lineback reporting from the U.S.