100 years Hamburg – Wafer Production
Efficiency has always been at the heart of everything we do.
In today’s post celebrating 100 years of history in Hamburg, we’re looking at our journey from producing under a million radio tubes under the name Valvo in 1925/26, to shipping out over 100 billion components annually from the largest factory producing small-signal diodes and transistors in the world, accounting for around a quarter of global production.
The term wafer started appearing in the semiconductor industry in the 1950s to describe a thin round slice of semiconductor material, the most common being germanium or silicon. Wafers come in many different sizes, ranging from 25mm (1 inch) up to 450mm (17.7 inch). At our Hamburg site, we focus on 150/200mm (6/8 inch) wafers, with the 200mm quickly becoming the standard.
In 1965, the first 2-inch wafers started rolling off the line and enough were produced to make 250 million dies. By 1975, that figure had increased to over 1 billion. In 2000, 150mm wafer production capability was added, and the number of potential dies reached 20 billion. This was the first 6-inch production line in the world and allowed for new benchmarks in efficiency and production cost reduction.
#didyounkow Individual wafers, depending on their size, can hold anywhere from several dozen to thousands of chips. After a 4-6 week processing period, our wafers are covered in numerous dies. These dies are then sectioned and packaged to become diodes and transistors. Today’s smallest diodes can fit around 500,000 onto a single 200mm wafer. This translates to 1.8 times more components being produced on a 200mm wafer compared to a 150mm wafer, showcasing the significant impact on production efficiency.
In 1989, our Hamburg factory shipped 2.8 billion semiconductor elements. This figure skyrocketed to 45 billion by 2009. Today, we’re producing well over 100 billion components, which end up in every piece of electronics you can imagine.
#100yearshamburg #manufacturingefficiency #semiconductorindustry
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