GoKawiilIn 1970, Bill Harding envisioned a fully automated wafer-fabrication line that would produce integrated circuits in less than one day. Not only was such a goal gutsy 54 years ago, it would be bold even in today’s billion-dollar fabs, where the fabrication time of an advanced IC is measured in weeks, not days. Back then, ICs, such as random-access memory chips, were typically produced in a monthlong stop-and-go march through dozens of manual work stations.
At the time, Harding was the manager of IBM’s Manufacturing Research group, in East Fishkill, N.Y. The project he would lead to make his vision a reality, all but unknown today, was called Project SWIFT. To achieve such an amazingly short turnaround time required a level of automation that could only be accomplished by a paradigm shift in the design of integrated-circuit manufacturing lines. Harding and his team accomplished it, achieving advances that would eventually be reflected throughout the global semiconductor industry. Many of SWIFT’s groundbreaking innovations are now commonplace in today’s highly automated chip fabrication plants, but SWIFT’s incredibly short turnaround time has never been equaled.
SWIFT averaged 5 hours to complete each layer of its fabrication process, while the fastest modern fabs take 19 hours per processing layer, and the industry average is 36 hours. Although today’s integrated circuits are built with many more layers, on larger wafers the size of small pizzas, and the processing is more complex, those factors do not altogether close the gap. Harding’s automated manufacturing line was really, truly, swift.
A Semiconductor Manufacturing Manifesto
I encountered Harding for the first time in 1962, and hoped it would be the last. IBM was gearing up to produce its first completely solid-state computer, the System/360. It was a somewhat rocky encounter. “What the hell good is that?” he bellowed at me as I demonstrated how tiny, unpackaged semiconductor dice could be automatically handled in bulk for testing and sorting.
Author Jesse Aronstein [at far right, in top photo] took a break from managing the equipment group of Project SWIFT to play French horn one evening a week with the Southern Dutchess Pops Orchestra. Another key manager, Walter J. “Wally” Kleinfelder [bottom left], standing at right, headed the process group of Project SWIFT. William E. “Bill” Harding [bottom right], seen here in 1973, was a brusque WW II combat veteran and creative innovator. He conceived and directed IBM’s Project SWIFT, which succeeded in fabricating integrated circuits in one day. Clockwise from top: IBM/Computer History Museum; IBM (2)
William E. (“Bill”) Harding was an innovative thinker and inventor. He had been developing semiconductors and their manufacturing technology at IBM for three years when the company’s new Components Division was formed in 1961. Harding became a midlevel manager in the new division, responsible for developing and producing the equipment required to manufacture the System/360’s solid-state devices and circuit modules.
He was rough around the edges for an IBM manager. But perhaps it was to be expected of someone who had grown up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was wounded three times in combat in World War II while serving in General George S. Patton’s Third Army. After the war, Harding earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and physics and became a member of IEEE.
I joined IBM in 1961, coming from rocket-engine development at General Electric. Like most engineers at the time, I knew nothing about semiconductor manufacturing. Five years prior, I had attended a vacuum-tube electronics course in which the professor described the transistor as “a laboratory curiosity, which may or may not ever amount to anything.”
Project SWIFT occupied a small space, shown here in yellow, in building 310 at IBM’s sprawling East Fishkill semiconductor facility. IBM
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