TSMC Nanke 14 Factory Production Interruption Could Affect NVIDIA and Others
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What it comes down to is that it's basically impossible from a process integration perspective. Sure, you can take assays, and you do. But what about the things you aren't looking for in your assays? All you can do is plug it in, cross your fingers, and look at the yield trends. Not only does sulfuric mix in the supply lines, it gets used throughout the entire process. So if you do have some kind of strange contaminant that you didn't test for, maybe it only actually hurts you pre-gate. And the damage ramps up slowly and unevenly. But if your yield tanks, then you have to scramble to figure out what happened, and sulfuric isn't even your first suspect. (Because there are thousands of things like this that can tank your yields.)
What's worse, you're literally over a barrel. Sometimes Plant A has to shut down and can't send you another iso. Do you take an iso from (unqualified) Plant B? Do you crack open a barrel of sulfuric? You have a stock of qualified sulfuric in barrels, for situations like this, but in practice barrels are worse than isos. Metal everywhere.
I'm not saying it's sulfuric in this case. Lots of chemicals have a story like this one, but it would also not surprise me one little bit.
ICP-MS and NMR should cover most elemental impurities.
But based on what I know, modern ICs require exceptional levels of purity of the materials. A single atom can ruin a transistor, and therefore the complete chip.
AFAIK the methods you mentioned aren't sensitive enough to detect individual atoms in barrels of stuff. E.g. ICP-MS detects 1E-15 concentrations, but in absolute numbers, 1E15 molecules is only 1.66e-9 mole, e.g. for iron (55.8g/mole), it translates to 1E+10 defects per kg of stuff. Way too many.
A lot of chemical test equipment use semiconductor sensors of some kind - optical or otherwise - and most likely the sensitivity limit is simply the noise floor of the sensors. In good instruments they tend use good, or amazing detectors but they are still operating at the noise floor, or sometimes even below.
So running tests again doesn't really help sensitivity, for that you would most likely have to use some chemical process that amplifies the effect of the contaminants you are looking for. Hence the problem of having to know what to lool for in validating new chemicals, if you need ultra pure chemicals.
Most semiconductor companies bin chips based on how broken they are. GPUs, for example, frequently have different skus with the same chip differentiated by how many processors are broken (and thus disabled).
- Chemicals aren’t created from thin air (although that is one ingredient). You will still have products coming in, only now you are one step closer to, say, raw oil, which has far more natural variation than the refined product you previously bought
= the secret to, like, half our wealth is specialization. Doing complicated stuff as a side hustle in-house just isn’t our economy works.
Also, "cutting-edge" made me smile a little bit; this particular issue was mostly about plumbing :)
For that matter, how specialized is the market for whichever high-purity chemicals were behind this incident? What portion of the semiconductor industry was purchasing from the same supplier? We may not have heard the last of this.
https://bgpmon.net/bgp-leak-causing-internet-outages-in-japa...
It’s known and understood completely within any silicon company. If you can afford it, and it’s technically possible (no special deals or tech), you’ll require at least some functionality at a second fab. What you cannot do is immediately get a second fab up and running. There’s a surprising amount of process tuning, sometimes accommodating new device models, and design rule differences (they will not guarantee or sometimes even start if they’re not meet). It’s in no way turn-key if you’re anywhere near the limits of what the fab can do.
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node#Leading_edge_tr...
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13904/asml-to-ship-30-euv-sca...
The barrier to entry is massive, even for mega corporations.
And over 100B for an entire fab complex, if you want to have even a remote hope of attaining real economies of scale.
This is why I predict that this industry will go the way of jet engine manufacturing, without any hope of any new competitor coming.
In 2016, an explosion at a single industrial gas facility caused a whipped cream shortage in the US. [1] I mean in the scheme of world problems, that's one we'll survive, but it does illustrate how vulnerable a lot of our supply chains are.
In 2007, the shutdown of the Canadian Chalk River reactor caused worldwide shortages of isotopes used for medical imaging, with real life consequences for patients. [2]
There are probably countless other examples. In the end, its the direct consequence of the constant quest to lower production costs and increase efficiencies.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/12/the-dead...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/business/worldbusiness/06...
About a decade ago I visited a European fab of one of the European semiconductor manufacturers, where they told me they are also manufacturing for an American semiconductor firm (which had its own network of fabs). The reason was insistence from auto companies to diversify the supply chain, getting the same processor from multiple fabs in different continents.
- Intel not only hasn't released 10nm chips yet, they even stopped publicizing transistor count of their 14nm, the node from five years ago.
- Not to mention their i7 chips node over node being marginal improvements for the past 10 years or so.
- And all of a sudden, Intel's competitors seem to be right on track with 7nm, with the Moore's law giant itself, and with most resources, is struggling at 10nm.
Interesting that FEs are working, I had heard that that configuration was problematic. Have you seen much thermal throttling with them butting up against each other? I was going to resign myself to one blower 1080Ti in slot 1 and then a 2080Ti in 2 and 4, but maybe I don't have to :-)
With Intel's CPU dominance being withered by AMD and ARM solutions, and Nvidia's own dominance being thrown into question, the hardware industry is getting more interesting all the time.
Prices will be higher, and the need to compete on quality/performance will be lower.
[1] https://www.tsmc.com/english/investorRelations/quarterly_res...
Yes, 10+ 9 purity. And the impurities in those crystals were put in there on purpose (to make N-type or P-type Silicon). I never personally understood the chemistry or physics behind the process, but its always cool thinking about how exceptionally pure this whole process is.
In any case, if a run of wafers is bad, that can easily be hundreds-of-thousands of dollars worth of chips per wafer. For whatever reason, it seems like these wafers did not have the 99.99999999% purity needed to successfully make chips, so everyone's chips are ruined. Whatever the issue is, you can rest assured that a ton of business folk are going to be pissed.
It's possible one of the washes or doping agents was contaminated, rather than the wafers themselves.
It's great.
Always wish I could go back and re-record this talking about 50% as fast.
I'm listening to this at 1.5x, which is my usual listening speed for non-musical videos. Your speed is fine.
Toastmasters [0] has helped me reduced my use of filler words: ahh, uhm, and, okay, so, you know, like, well, [pregnant pauses], [double clutches]. It's hard for me to listen to politicians anymore, because they're always gumming up their speech with linguistic crutches. I didn't used to notice.
[0] https://www.toastmasters.org/
"When we find ourselves rattled while speaking — whether we’re nervous, distracted, or at a loss for what comes next — it’s easy to lean on filler words. These may give us a moment to collect our thoughts before we press on, and in some cases, they may be useful indicators that the audience should pay special attention to what comes next. But when we start to overuse them, they become crutches — academics call them disfluencies — that diminish our credibility and distract from our message." [1]
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/08/how-to-stop-saying-um-ah-and-you-kno...
Do you have any plans to give an updated talk. It would be interesting to know about what comes after 7nm.
Which industry are you in now?
Soooo, it's now 2019.. is EUV working?
This is so incredible it makes me wonder if we're looking at industrial sabotage. I can't believe TSMC wouldn't have safeguards in place to prevent contamination under normal circumstances, much less at this scale.
You can have safeguards against contamination but these safeguards aren’t 100% reliable. The article reports “substandard” chemicals and that’s an umbrella term that includes contamination and many other problems.
Speaking as nothing more than a hobbyist, I can tell you that analog photography suffers from many of the same problems you might see in semiconductor manufacturing, only on a much smaller scale. I used to mix my own photochemicals from raw reagents and it’s a complex subject, to say the least. Exposure to air and minerals in the water have all sorts of effects, and the standard way to test your process is just to run film through it. I’m sure that fabs have better testing equipment than I do, but at the end of the day, it’s not feasible to test everything and I’m not surprised that a bad batch of chemicals made it through, ruining many batches of wafers due to the sheer depth of the manufacturing pipeline.
With photochemicals, a small change in the developer formulation can result in what is more or less a completely black and unworkable negative, or possibly a blank negative. I expect semiconductor manufacturing to be similar, since both processes rely so heavily on knowing reaction rates. Kinetics is complicated, to say the least. For photochemistry I rely heavily on using known developer / film concentrations and being borderline religious when it comes to temperature and time.
Dude at vendor switched a label on two boxes. Parts inside looked identical, and were installed. No way to tell until ~week later when chips hit end of line test and didn't work.
An average process tool (not even a complicated one) probably has a dozen different gasses and chemicals running into it. In a fab it's hundreds likely thousands. Things happen. They all come from vendors around the world, made in batches that vary and rely on negotiated compliance standards and qualifications.
Systems are everything. Wafers travel in boxes 10,000x cleaner than an OR inside a building 1,000x cleaner than an OR...everything matters.
Source: https://www.semiwiki.com/forum/attachments/content/attachmen...
AMD is using TSMC's 7nm process and Global Foundries' 12/14nm processes: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/276169-amd-moves-all-7...