Micron announced Thursday that it will build an all-new, state-of-the-art memory fab near the company’s home base of Boise, Idaho. The fab will cost Micron $15 billion and is expected to be operational by the end of the decade.
The new Micron memory fab will be located adjacent to the company’s primary research and development center near its corporate headquarters in the city. This is expected to improve operational efficiency, accelerate technology deployment, and reduce time to market. In fact, the new fab is one of the few semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the world located near a major R&D center. Another similar site Micron has for both R&D and mass production is near Hiroshima, Japan.
Micron plans to invest $15 billion in new manufacturing facilities. It also plans to obtain federal grants and credits made possible by the Chip and Science Act, as well as incentives provided by the State of Idaho. That said, the total fab cost will exceed $15 billion.
Micron has called its new project a “state-of-the-art memory manufacturing fab,” but has not disclosed what type of memory it will produce. On the other hand, the company will employ his 2,000 employees and he will be operational by the end of 2026, which means 2026 if construction starts in early 2023, and 2029 if construction is delayed. said to start Either way, DRAM manufacturing facilities designed to produce memory in the next decade or so are destined to be ready for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography tools.
Micron has not disclosed plans to produce 3D NAND memory for its DRAM devices in its new fab. Mass production of 3D NAND requires more chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and etch machines, while DRAM requires more lithography tools, so different types of memory require different cleanroom configurations. In recent years, Samsung and SK Hynix have built fabs that can be reconfigured from 3D NAND to DRAM and vice versa, but I’m not sure if this applies to Micron.
Micron currently has five wafer fabrication facilities worldwide. Two 3D NAND fabs in Singapore, a Japanese DRAM fab near Hiroshima, and two DRAM fabs in Taiwan (near Taichung and Taoyuan).
Micron’s $15 billion investment in its Boise, Idaho facility is part of the company’s plans to invest $40 billion in advanced memory manufacturing in the United States over the next decade. If the company succeeds in investing this amount in a new fab in the United States, a large portion (or at least a very large portion) of Micron’s semiconductors (such as 3D NAND or DRAM devices) will be in the United States about 10 years from now. will be manufactured. .
