Times Union

Officials at the SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Albany unveiled its first fully-patterned 450mm wafers Tuesday at a major computer chip industry conference in San Francisco.

The NanoCollege is the headquarters for the Global 450 Consortium, a coalition of the world’s five largest microchip manufacturers that have set up a pilot factory at the school that processes chips on 450mm wafers, instead of the 300mm wafers that are the current leading-edge standard.

The 450mm wafers, which are made of silicon and measure 18 inches across, can produce more than double the number of chips on a 300mm wafer, which measures 12 inches across.

Although the industry has been producing blank 450mm test wafers for years now in preparation of the transition, patterned wafers are new since the lithography companies that make the machines that print the circuitry on the wafers have not yet unveiled new 450mm machines.

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