Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dogma1138 | Hacker News Reader

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Intel's biggest mistake over the past 10 years was not to open it's foundry services sooner now it's custom foundry services are nearly irrelevant outside of a few niche markets.

Mobile SoC design and being answerable to a huge number of very large customers forced fabs to evolve their processes in a way where market forces and customer demand forces requirements rather than office politics.

Intel has still an edge on many parts of the manufacturing process but as far as the lithography goes they've lost this round.

Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes.

Intel is also fighting a much tougher fight now TSMC was always good (better than AMD/GloFo) but now you also have the Alliance which is IBM/Samsung/GloFo which combine resources on process R&D.

GloFo botched their 20/22nm process and had to scrap it completely and if they couldn't use Samsung's 20nm process and call it 14nm AMD's Zen would likely would never have materialized because of the WSA.

And this is essentially the gist of things GloFo/Samsung/IBM are essentially a united front, TSMC is as capable as ever and what all of these 4 (and more) share in common is that they answer to external customers so if something doesn't work there is a much bigger pressure to drop it and find something that would instead of sinking more and more cost into it because of internal politics.

I'm not sure that's true. Intel has managed to have a higher performance process than their competitors in part by accepting more restrictive design rules. Because their architects can work hand-in-glove with their process engineers as a new node comes up they can have two-way feedback on this and to some extent design their process around their architecture's requirements. But it's very hard for third parties to work with their main process. They do have a separate relaxed rules process for use when acting as a foundry.

Pursuing the foundry route seriously would have meant Intel giving up one of its largest advantages.

> Luckily for them their 10nm was much more ambitious than any of the 7nm designs and they are facing problems that other fabs will not face until their 5nm and beyond processes.

I've always wondered about this. What's to keep the hard won experience and knowledge of how to do cobalt from escaping into the wile and being adopted at a much higher rate by their competitors?

It goes both ways I guess, and some experience and working at smaller scales can also come to Intel, but I would imagine the gains for a leg up are greater with the harder process.

Sure, there are IP laws in place, but just not having to waste months (or manpower in parallel research) on paths where you can get a hint (path B is a dead end, don't devote much to it) seems like a gain in itself.

My ex is a process improvement engineer at Intel she told me a story about considerably higher failure rate for silicon that was manufactured in a northern part of a room vs the southern part what’s more odd is that it only affected some products that shared this room in their pipeline.

The cause was that the water pipes under that section would impact that part of the process because of mechanical vibration the reason why it didn’t impact all processes because they were tied to the cooling system and it only had an effect when other procsses put stress on it.

These vibaration were apparently so small that they couldn’t measure the difference they identified this through a process of elimination.

This is a classical story of practical vs theoretical engineering the secret sauce isn’t the recepie it’s the cook.

If you think about it this way if it was so easy to recreate a process through reverse engineering a few hot chips talks and poaching Intel wouldn’t be in this mess and GloFo didn’t had to scrap their 20nm process.

When you almost at the level of moving atoms around the wing flaps of a butterfly start to really matter.

We’re well pass the time where you had Disney animators draw transistors on sheets and copper masks were cut by hand it wouldn’t surprise me if there are no beans days at foundries these days since a fart across the building might increase your defect rate by 3%

> If you think about it this way if it was so easy to recreate a process through reverse engineering a few hot chips talks and poaching Intel wouldn’t be in this mess and GloFo didn’t had to scrap their 20nm process.

That's what I'm talking about. Who's to say there aren't a few gotchas like this in the new cobalt processing, and that's not exactly something that can be protected under IP law (or even necessarily by NDA, at least provably).

How much time does it save to have the second company attempting it get a hint of "hey, the new process is much more susceptible to problems of X,Y and Z than you would think, and you can save yourself months of headaches by being extra vigilant with respect to those from the beginning." ?

The benefit of the lead time you get as the first really needs to pay off, since the followers almost always have it easier. It's not hard to imagine that sometimes the pain and cost of being first is actually higher than the benefit and profit for that time period.

Don’t know from my limited exposure I would be really surprised if Intel and another Foundry would encounter the same problem on a level any more granular than “issues with Cobalt” since there are so many factors that impact the process. Intel and GloFo produce completely different silicon and it becomes more and more dissimilar with each step of the process so many factors impact this from where your raw materials come from and how long is the path between step 23 and 27 in the pipeline to what latitude your fav is located at and where does it face.

The example I gave in my previous was simplified the actual root cause was much weirder and included a condition where the flow rate would have to get to X and the temperature to get to just an exact Y for thermal expansion to apparently compress the insulation enoguh for it to matter if the temp would be a tad to low it won’t impact anything if it goes above the next level of flow rate it wouldn’t have an impact yet again because it would drop the temp.

Intel’s whole conflict free campaign was a marketing spin on a real problem and a way to benefit from the extra cost of materials and that extra cost wasn’t because of children in African mines.

Intel needs so much control over the raw materials to prevent contamination that they issue orders on what fuel, hydraulic fluid and lubricants can be used to mine their dirt to prevent or at least reduce contamination.

Heck I’m sure if one will read what ever T&C they attach to their supply contracts the metal composition of the pickaxes will be specified.

They survey and sample everything and essentially tell their supplier ok you can mine this specific area everything in the top 1m you get rid off everything below 10m we don’t want.

Like honestly at this point I think the only way for GloFo to have exactly the same problem as Intel is we live in a simulation.

They will however have their own problems with leakage, bonding, crystallization and w/e else can go wrong with this insanity with Cobalt but likely they’ll have completely different root causes and different solutions.

Thanks for sharing this story!

Back in the early days when silicon valley actually made silicon, they realized that batches would be effected by the local farms or if someone didn't wash their hands after using the bathroom.

Aren't all manufacturers dependent on ASML's stuff, anyway? As far as I know, none of the big guys are developing their own EUV tech. Where's the edge?

Got told once* that they have specific teams working with Intel, etc. with pretty strict rules, where if you ever work for one of those teams you can't ever work for one of the others. So if I got it right ASML develops their EUV tech, etc and then those teams build things on top of that with Intel, TSMC and so on.

*at an ASML booth at a kind of job fair at my uni

The litography is just one part of the manufacturing process and there are many ways to apply the same tech. Also the development as mentioned below is completely segregated between teams.

Last time we were vendor shopping we considered Intel and had an in-person meeting. I'm not sure why they bothered turning up as they were nowhere near competitive. It was pretty clear they were not interested in any thing that involved any work from them. If only someone else could offer EMIB technology...

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