The university of Michigan has its own foundry, but I suspect it's not
nearly as mechanized as a typical industry foundry.  Most of the wafer
movement is done by hand from cell to cell.  It occupies a portion of
the EECS building (you can see maps which include the clean rooms at
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/ .

You can make it fairly small - I suspect one could fit a simple foundry
in a small home (1000 sq feet) but getting the utility hook ups (not to
mention the large quantities of chemicals, water, etc) may be problematic.

But the question I have is why?  The reason UofM has their own VLSI lab
is (aside from teaching) for specialized products that would be
difficult to farm out since they have to be created by hand anyway
(terahertz radio circuits/antennas, neurological interface devices, etc).

You can form most stuff you'd need with an FPGA and then farm that out
for quantity.  If you were planning on doing analog and digital on the
same silicon than a simple foundry simply isn't going to cut it.

-Adam

Charles Craft wrote:

>Too many spy movies on the dish and too many years of watching X Files.   :-)
>
>What's it take to set up a small chip foundry?
>I think there have been threads on the PIClist about the government chips that self destruct if
>you penetrate the package the wafer is in.
>
>A commercial chip plant is pretty huge but if you didn't care about quantity or speed how small could you make it?
>Aren't there universities where students make their own chips?
>Can you make chips in a few thousand square foot warehouse?
>
>
>
>http://www.utwatch.org/oldnews/aas_sematech_6_15_03.html
>
>Bid to keep Sematech invokes national security
>
>Proposal for government foundry shows extent of Austin effort to head off a move to New York
>By Chuck Lindell
>AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
>Sunday, June 15, 2003
>
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