One of the oldest semiconductor manufacturing facilities in Singapore sits in a discreet corner of the Bendemeer district, almost hidden by larger neighbours and trees that have grown nearly as tall as the building over the years.

Built in 1968 by Texas Instruments and bought over by Micron 30 years later, the facility’s entire lifespan has been dedicated to semiconductor production, through the PC boom, the Internet age, the smartphone era, and now the generative AI decade.

This is trickier than it sounds; manufacturing technology and techniques have evolved dramatically over the years, while market demand has increased drastically. And the nature of semiconductor manufacturing means that even one established production floor, let alone an entire building, cannot be easily changed or upgraded without massive disruption and heightened risks to the process. Tearing down a wall to enlarge a space, for example, would affect highly calibrated equipment and severely contaminate the cleanroom environment regardless of precautions.

So, when the building was renovated several years ago and the production floors upgraded, one of the considerations was how to automate manual tasks without major structural changes.

“As the product continues to evolve, the integration continues to be smaller, the complexity continues to increase, you can't really continue to do the operations manually,” said Gianpaolo Mettifogo, vice-president of assembly and test at Micron Singapore.

A unique automation solution for a unique challenge

One step in the process that urgently needed to be changed was the practice of moving components between assembly lines by hand. Modern factory floors automate this step, but there was no room for typical automation solutions on the Bendemeer facility’s almost 60-year-old production floors, with their low ceilings and narrow aisles that could not be enlarged.

Instead, technicians would manually remove wafers from the machines, load them onto hand carts, and push the carts to the next part of the floor where the wafers would be unloaded and put into the line by hand.

This amount of manual handling slowed down the process, increased the potential for error, and took up precious manpower that could have been deployed elsewhere - a real concern in a market where engineering talent has been getting scarcer year by year.

To get around the structural constraints, engineering teams adapted a miniature rail system to fit under the low ceilings, and further adapted the installation procedure for minimal disruption to the cleanroom. The upgrade took several years to complete, working line by line and practically quarantining each section of the production floor as the installation progressed.

The Bendemeer facility’s upgrades were completed less than a year ago, and the new automation system (top, shown in action under the visibly low ceiling of the production floor) remains the pride of Micron’s assembly and test teams.

“One way of thinking when you introduce automation is that you can reduce the workforce. Actually, it's not true,” said Mettifogo. “It’s not that we want to reduce the number of employees, we want to reduce the variability of the process and minimise the possibility of mistakes, and upskill the employees that we have.”