"Technically, it's feasible right now, but these things have some momentum to overcome," Kane added.

Asyst makes standard mechanical interface (SMIF) mini-environment systems, which safeguard the integrity of wafers by protecting them from human, environmental, mechanical and chemical harm.

Kane said that as each boat of 25 300-mm wafers is worth around $1 million, it is better to get machines to handle them than to allow humans to have any contact at all.

Dennis Riccio, senior vice president of global customer operations at Asyst, said, "It is the objective to go nearly fully automated in three to five years. In Taiwan, [the foundries] are stating that as their ultimate goal."

Kane added that the computing power is already available to control entire fabs, doing away with the need for humans at the operational level, and that an individual 300-mm wafer can be tracked throughout its progress through a fab using identification marks on wafers and tags.

Last year, between 10 and 15 percent of Asyst's sales were based on 300-mm equipment. This year Kane expects this to increase to 20-25 percent. But the general industry downturn means he expects there will be a decline in total revenues of around 20 percent in 2001, although this follows a five-fold increase in 2000 over 1999.

"The next upturn will see a significant shift [to 300-mm equipment] because people are either building 300-mm fabs or upgrading 200-mm fabs. Europe is a hotbed for fabs that can be upgraded," Kane added.

But Kane noted that it would be between five and 10 years before Asyst stops making 200-mm equipment.

Jack Ghiselly, president of GW Associates Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.), which designs software that connects fab equipment, agreed that humans are a liability where wafers are concerned, not least because of the sheer weight of a full boat of 300-mm wafers. U.S. health and safety laws prohibit staff from carrying such a weight, making robotic transport essential.

But Ghiselly said that there is a bottleneck to fab automation at the software level because of the hundreds of different types of equipment avaiable from tens of suppliers. If interface issues between them are not addressed, full automation will never happen.

"Humans can't do things correctly 99.9 percent of the time. At 300 millimeters, automation is critical. In the fabs we've seen so far, the problem in automation involves the interface with 400 tools of 50 different types. That's the ball and chain around the lights-out fab."

Ghiselly continued, "If it's ever going to be achieved, there needs to be a quantum leap in the automatability of the 50 equipment suppliers. That's the bottleneck."

Ghiselly is keen for GW Associates to cash in on this bottleneck. "People are smart, but robots are stupid, so you wrap them with smart software. [Equipment suppliers] need to outsource automation because time is short."

Ian Cameron is business editor of Electronics Times, EE Times' sister paper in the United Kingdom.