Design for Manufacture

We generally think of mass production as a uniquely twentieth-century phenomenon. However, its evolution can be traced back much further. The explosion in printed books, following Johannes Gutenberg’s fifteenth-century development of the Korean invention of movable type, had an impact on human society of heroic proportions. Precursors of modern mass-production, based on the specialization of labour and the use of specialized machinery to ensure a high degree of uniformity, can be traced to the eighteenth century. Writing in The Wealth of Nations in 1776, Adam Smith used the manufacture of pins to exemplify the improvement in productivity resulting from the utilization of uniform production techniques. Today, every conceivable sort of commodity is mass-produced. Pills, paints, pipes, plastics, packages, pamphlets and programs are mixed, extruded, poured, forged, rolled, stamped, molded, glued, printed, duplicated and dispatched worldwide on an immense daily scale. The most successful modern products are an amalgamation of many disciplines, years of experience, careful execution, rigorous production control and never-ending refinement. In no other industry is the cross-disciplinary matrix so tightly woven, and the number of interacting elements so incredibly high, as in the semiconductor business. Reaching back to Gutenberg, and drawing on the principles of photography pioneered by Daguerre in the 1830s (embracing optics, lens-making, photosensitive films and chemistry), transistors are defined by a process of lithography, which is essentially printing. But what eloquent printing this is! A 200-mm silicon wafer has a useful area of about a little less than a page of this book containing some 400 words of text, equivalent to perhaps 16,000 bits. However, when divided into chips the size of a modest microprocessor, today containing about 50 million transistors, through perhaps 20 successive layers of printing and processing each wafer generates some 10 billion devices in a single mass-produced entity. In a production lot containing 40 such wafers, some 400 billion tiny objects are manufactured in a single batch. Multiply this by the daily manufacture of integrated circuits worldwide, and it will be apparent that the number of transistors that have been produced Barrie Gilbert

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