End-to-End Manufacturing Excellence: Seven Questions Every New (or Growing) Fab Team Should Be Asking
If you plan to design, start up or scale a semiconductor fab in 2026, the difference between “on time, on budget, at spec” and “overrun and underperform” on the choices you make before the first tool ever hits the floor. These choices aren’t regional, they’re global. To surface the most practical, experience-based guidance, we’ve framed seven critical questions every leadership team should be asking.
These questions are grounded in real-world perspectives shared at the latest SEMICON Europa Executive Forum, where Entegris hosted a panel on End-to-End Manufacturing Excellence: Designing, Starting Up, and Scaling Fabs for Competitive Advantage. The discussion, moderated by Mark Puttock, Ph.D. (Senior Director, Technology and Innovation, Entegris), brought together leaders spanning strategy and operations consulting, design build, device manufacturing, R&D, materials, and manufacturing asset transactions:
Oliver Aubel, Corporate Lead Automotive Solutions, GlobalFoundries
Herbert Blaschitz, VP, ATF, Exyte
Jean René Lèquepeys, VP, CEA Leti
Giovanni Notarnicola, Partner Semiconductor, Porsche Consulting
Stephen Rothrock, CEO, ATREG
What follows is a practical roadmap drawn from that conversation, seven questions that can help you accelerate ramp up, strengthen resilience, and build fabs that compete globally.
1) What does it really take to go from a greenfield to “ready for equipment”?
Building a fab requires extensive early-stage planning, and the overall timeline varies significantly depending on the region
Herbert Blaschitz (Exyte) described the full arc from “nothing” to a running fab. On a greenfield site, build time can range from ~20 months (achievable today only in parts of Asia like Taiwan or China) to ~40 months in the U.S. and Europe—often at least twice the cost in those latter regions. What really drives the time and cost gap isn’t the physical build; it’s the permitting and regulatory complexity.
In much of Asia, there are standardized wafer fab construction codes; in Europe and the U.S., each fab is still treated as a bespoke project, driving extensive regulatory back-and-forth. Front end planning is cheap (<1% of total cost) and should start early, long before construction to size utilities (power, water, gases), align safety envelopes, and smooth approvals.
What to add from the fab performance lens: Materials choices have a direct impact on commissioning speed and operational readiness. When stakeholders across the full ecosystem align early on materials purity and monitoring requirements, the fab enters process qualification with a consistent set of expectations and capabilities. This early coordination helps avoid costly disruptions at the critical moment when the fab transitions from construction to running real wafers.
2) Where do regional differences bite the hardest, build speed or funding flows?
Both. Regions like Europe and North America face longer permitting cycles and funding constraints that delay tool acquisition.
From a transactions lens, Stephen Rothrock (ATREG) noted a key contrast: in Asia (including Japan), public funds often flow before purchase orders, letting owners reserve scarce tools 18–24 months ahead. In parts of Europe, funds are typically released after POs, which is misaligned with today’s constrained tool lead times and contributes to greenfield delays. Even in brownfield or repurposing scenarios, investors worry about how long it will take to navigate permits and national security reviews.
3) What’s the single biggest supply chain gap that most threatens time to revenue?
Advanced packaging.
Even as front-end incentives help wafer fabs break ground, wafers still have to be flown to Asia for advanced packaging—an acute risk for automotive, aerospace, and defense flows. Europe is often cited as having “almost zero” packaging capacity; globally, the message is broader: don’t scale frontend capacity without a plan for backend colocation, secure logistics, or at least strategic partnerships that shorten that last mile. As Aubel put it, it’s not that every region must do everything at full scale, but each must maintain capability and knowledge across the chain to keep options open.
Materials angle: Advanced packaging faces dual materials challenges: substrate integrity risks such as warpage, contamination, and vibration-induced damage during transport and handling, and high viscosity material defects like voids, delamination, and microbridges that threaten reliability when purity and filtration are insufficient. Advanced handling and chemical delivery solutions are essential to safeguard yield and protect time to revenue.
4) Are we using AI in fabs yet—or just talking about it?
Yes, and it’s increasingly practical provided you treat data strategy as a design choice, not an afterthought.
Giovanni Notarnicola (Porsche Consulting) framed AI’s promise around virtual qualification, predictive maintenance, and faster yield learning, but warned that ownership of data and fragmented vendor policies can slow progress unless fabs set explicit data objectives up front.
GlobalFoundries’ Oliver Aubel shared that a modern high mix fab may run ~1 million sensors, with frequent signals that overwhelm humans; AI helps separate signal from noise and improve both line yield and product yield (e.g., using acoustic monitoring to predict transport system failures). Research centers like CEA-Leti are already running multi-terabyte/day data pipelines and dedicated AI programs to boost throughput, resource efficiency, and knowledge capture that underscores that algorithms still rely on domain experts to be useful.
What to add from the materials vantage point: Entegris’ AI vision is “Shift Left and Connect Right.” Shift Left connects upstream with raw material suppliers (data sharing on quality signals), while Connect Right links downstream with device and module makers, correlating wafer level measurements with materials manufacturing and envisioning digital passports that travel across the value chain.
5) Why do strong R&D ecosystems still struggle to translate into share gains?
Because the bridge from lab to high volume manufacturing (HVM) is still too narrow and underfunded.
Jean René Lèquepeys (CEA-Leti) was blunt: even with worldclass RTOs (Leti, imec, Fraunhofer), Europe produces ~8% of global semiconductors proving that tech transfer isn’t automatic. The fix is not more papers; it’s aligned roadmaps, clearer handoff mechanisms, and incentives that pay for the 3–5 year “valley of deployment” between proof of concept and HVM. The FDSOI journey with CEA-Leti → ST → GlobalFoundries shows what success looks like when roadmaps and resources line up (including sending Leti engineers onsite to accelerate industrialization). For any region, the takeaway is universal: plan the transfer path (people, metrology parity, tooling deltas, reliability protocols) as part of the research charter, not afterward.
Where materials partners help: By running co-optimized experiments in their own process toolsets, outside your HVM lines, vendors like Entegris can extend your design of experiment, derisk transfers, and speed yield learning before full deployment.
6) Do we really have a talent shortage or the wrong definition of talent?
Both, especially if you forget the skilled trades.
It’s fashionable to focus on Ph.D.s, but Blaschitz emphasized that building and running fabs depends on electricians, welders, pipefitters, and other trades. A single megaproject can peak at 500–800 welders onsite; many regions can’t field that today, which directly lengthens schedules. Workforce strategies that combine university pipelines and trade school partnerships, visa agility, and predictable multi-fab build cadence (so suppliers can invest and retain crews) will outexecute those focused solely on design engineers.
Training that sticks: Onboarding doesn’t end at day 90. Entegris highlighted hands-on curricula that cover materials science, wet etch and clean, lithography, CMP, plus defectivity, inspection, and metrology fundamentals, all practical content that accelerates time to effectiveness for new hires and serves as valuable educational material for existing employees.
7) Is sustainability a cost center or a competitive edge?
It’s both today and a brand and cost advantage tomorrow, if you implement it.
Aubel argued for treating sustainability as part of the value proposition: self-generated/contracted low carbon power and aggressive water programs can control long-run cost volatility and differentiate with customers. Lèquepeys highlighted efforts like the European GENESIS program focused on PFAS alternatives and reduction—a template: set standards, fund consortia, and turn compliance into capability. Markets are already rewarding credible transition plays. Wherever you are, the practical stance is the same: measure it, build it into design rules, and make it auditable.
Materially speaking: Contamination strategies increasingly embed Scope 3 thinking to select solutions that reduce waste, minimize rework (fewer latent defects), and cut chemical usage without compromising yield.
“Manufacturing excellence” isn’t a slogan; it’s the compounded effect of hundreds of choices that either shorten or lengthen time to revenue. If you’re making those choices today, wherever your fab is, you’ll get farther, faster by standardizing what can be standardized (codes, handoffs, data rights), and customizing only where it drives a measurable competitive edge (AI use cases, packaging strategy, sustainability posture). That’s how you build resilient capacity that competes globally, not just locally.
If you’re mapping your AI roadmap for yield and ramp speed, start with a pragmatic framework from the field: Porsche Consulting x SEMI’s white paper, From Hype to Impact: Realizing AI’s Potential in Semiconductors Manufacturing. Download it here