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Small series of chips profitable by flexible concept Minimal Fab

René Raaijmakers
Reading time: 5 minutes

The Minimal Fab – a concept that has been in the works for more than a decade at a Japanese consortium – is now on sale. The technology brings small chip series within reach at affordable prices and a fast time to market.

A chip factory at roughly one-thousandth of the cost of a state of the art mega-fab. Shortly after the millennium change Japanese principle scientist Shiro Hara had this vision. He presented his first ideas for miniature wafer fabs in 2007 at the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). After more than a decade his idea has become reality: about forty mini-process modules are available for the manufacture of integrated circuits. A spacious office or workplace is sufficient to install an IC production line that doesn’t cost billions of dollars, but only tens of millions.

The distributor of the Minimal Fab, Tokyo Boeki Group, has its headquarters in Tokyo and a sales office in Moscow. Here, Domicro executives Marcel Grooten and Matthijs van Kooten got to know Shiro Hara. Both Grooten and Van Kooten previously worked at ODME and OTB and immediately recognized the power of the concept. Like the CD machines of ODME and the solar cell lines of OTB, the Minimal Fab process modules are operating in a one-piece flow in-line manufacturing principle without the need of a clean room. The entire manufacturing process sequence, from bare silicon to a functional wafer, is running in a closed and shielded environment.

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