"It costs more to make a chip than a plane" - nope, not if you don't build the fabs as Intel does. Of course Bloomberg (or at least many people there) should and does know better.
To misquote George Burns, too bad that all the people who know how to build fabs are busy hanging out on HN instead...
See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can use it.
There's something to be said for tight integration between fab and design when you're trying to go in to uncharted territory.
If you don't need to be at the edge of process technology, you're completely right of course.
Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much more but it's still millions, not billions.
Periodically, the wafer is washed using a form of water
so pure it isn’t found in nature. It’s so pure it’s
lethal. If you drank enough of it, it would pull
essential minerals out of your cells and kill you.
Bohr’s solution, unveiled in 2007, was to coat parts of
the transistor with hafnium, a silvery metal not found
in nature
Who did that, and why did they do it? What goes through a journalist's (or an editor's) head in the process of putting a statement like that in print?
The article is actually pretty interesting... but how much of it am I supposed to believe?
http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/ss/Distilled-Ve...
I've had this argument on here before and am not interested in revisiting it. Suffice it to say that you will be able to find plenty of sources for various old wives' tales along the lines of "Don't drink distilled/DI water, it'll kill you/rot your teeth/give you an itchy rash." None of them will include respected medical texts, legitimate peer-reviewed journals, or even blog posts written by people who remember what their fifth grade Health textbook had to say about the operation of the human kidney.
It's worth objecting to this kind of mythology because some people may assume that the converse implication in the Bloomberg article is also true, and that drinking arbitrarily-large amounts of "normal" water is harmless. The truth is that you will die if you force yourself to drink too much DI or distilled water, and you will die just as quickly if you drink the same amount of tap water.
I'm not arguing it will kill you, even in more than a sip amounts, and my "don't make a habit of it", was more on the lines of "it's likely not great for your teeth and mouth", since its a bit more reactive, not "OMG THE SPECIAL WATER WILL KILL YOU. ALSO WHAT DID MY 5TH GRADE TEXTBOOK SAY?" Again, sorry if I wasn't clear in my first post!
Quick edit: I don't know if you edited your response or I just missed it the last paragraph (probably the latter) but I whole-heartedly agree on the point of addressing this kind of thing! Totally wasn't trying to argue for accuracy of that statement, just being very nit-picky about it being DI vs distilled...for really no reason what-so-ever, haha.