Factory Integration

The Factory Integration (FI) chapter of the IRDS is dedicated to ensuring that the microelectronics manufacturing infrastructure contains the necessary components to produce items at affordable cost and high volume. Realizing the potential of Moore's Law requires taking full advantage of device feature size reductions, new materials, yield improvement to near 100%, wafer size increases, and other manufacturing productivity improvements. This in turn requires a factory system that can fully integrate additional factory components and utilize these components collectively to deliver items that meet specifications determined by other IRDS international focus teams (IFTs) as well as cost, volume and yield targets. Preserving the decades-long trend of 30% per year reduction in cost per function also requires capturing all possible cost reduction opportunities. These include opportunities in front-end as well as back-end production, facilities, yield management and improvement, increased system integration such as up and down the supply chain, and improving environmental health and safety. FI challenges play a key role realizing these opportunities and many FI technology challenges are becoming limiters to achieving major technology milestones.