TAIPEI: Some of the world’s largest chip makers are exploring a move to bigger pizza-sized silicon wafers to boost efficiency and help them grab markets hare as demand for gadgets from music players to cameras surges — but only if someone foots the multi-billion dollar price tag.

In the next decade, some optimists say the semiconductor industry could migrate to 18-inch discs from the 12-inch wafer currently used in most mainstream chip production, as the new-generation wafers would yield more chips to meet rising demand for gadget such as Apple’s iPod.

Intel has advocated the need to shift to 18-inch silicon wafers by around 2012. Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, is also openly promoting the shift. The industry — from semiconductor makers to the companies which make their equipment — needs to agree on how to proceed. But analysts reckon memory chip makers Samsung, Elpida and Toshiba also support the move. Cost is a major hurdle.

A factory designed to make chips on 18-inch wafers could cost $10 billion or more to build, nearly triple the price of a current 12-inch wafer factory, analysts say.

“Pretty expensive, right?” said iSuppli analyst Nam Hyung Kim. “Silicon guys are capable of making 18-inch wafers. However, fab equipment companies have no interest in pursuing 18-inch wafer tools yet.” Only the biggest companies, like US-based Intel, South Korea’s Samsung, TSMC and Japan’s Toshiba, have the resources to be the first adopters of the new technology, said research company IC Insights.

“Sector leaders, I mean like Samsung in the memory industry and TSMC in the foundry market, will be big winners,” said John Jahn, a director at the industrial economics centre of Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute.

The size of a wafer, the silvery disks from which tiny chips are diced, is critical to make production more efficient. A new generation of larger wafers typically comes out each decade or so. Chip makers have focused attention on trying to shrink the size of transistors to sustain Moore’s Law, the industry maxim laid down by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every 18 months.