The Huge Endeavor to Produce a Tiny Microchip
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Hopefully the complexity of fabs and their operations makes it obvious why chip shortages can easily take 3-5 years to address if creating new fab capacity is the problem. It also costs between $30B-$50B to create a new "mega/ultra/super fab" operating at volumes typical of TSMC, Intel, Samsung, etc.
Even then, the small corner of a fab my business operates in isn't even mentioned in the article because it's far "too small" - all the businesses combined into our segment has total market revenue ranges in the $5B-$10B/year range. We are essential but small money-wise for most people to care.
The other part of the story with water - some of the most advanced water purification and recycling development is happening in this realm as well. Another company product line unrelated to ours is able to detect 10-nanometer-sized contaminants in water at volume both to assure incoming water purity as well as outgoing. Much of the total volume of water is recycled.
There are also surprising ways seemingly unrelated parts contribute. For example our product operates on clean-room floors but we put a ton of effort to reduce the floor footprint (we're 30% smaller than the de facto competitor). That directly reduces the amount of water consumed as a multiplier effect because it means you get more productive output per square foot of HVAC air processing capacity. That HVAC is primarily chilled water based. It also reduced energy consumption or increases productive output per unit kW.
Whenever you have high capital investment, you get the most innovation in basic technologies required for the business and the most spin-offs as well. Whenever you have low investment, you get zero innovation.
Are there enough chip fab facilities to cover basic requirements by businesses that don't directly build computers or smartphones?
And how badly would computers / smartphones be hit?
It feels like all our eggs are in one basket with Taiwan, or is that an incorrect assumption?
Everyone would be in a dire situation, but computers and smartphones would especially be hit hard because they are using the newest nodes. As an example, Apple's SoCs (at least the recent ones) all use TSMC 5nm and that production would just disappear.
It's not correct that all our eggs are in one basket. There just aren't enough baskets to accommodate the loss of an entire one. Other players include SMIC, UMC, Global Foundries, and now Intel, but their capacity isn't significant enough to make up for the loss.
This is why there is a push both to "second source" production, and to increase production capacity overall, especially in more politically stable geographies. The latter is a huge challenge because it requires a lot of capital and a lot of time.
I do hope more fab's are set up around the world, it would be horrible to have to build fabs after just losing 1/3 of the worlds manufacturing capacity, especially as the new fab itself would consume so much semiconductor in its own right.
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wow, interesting approach
I would like this more if there was an easier way to find the other article
Like a moderator linking to the prior comment section similar to how dang does here
However, I suspect it's probably going to continue being propagated forward due to Copy Exactly which has historically meant that Intel documents and copies the smallest details in all their fabs just in case they are necessary. In the end, if it ain't broke...
Unless there is a significant cost to it, and unless the benefit is understood, there is no reason that they should be faulted as ignorant cargo cultists simply for keeping it in place.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/how-intel...
> For decades, Intel’s cleanrooms have been lit like darkrooms, bathed in a deep, low yellow. “That’s an anachronism,” says Mark Bohr, a small, serious man who has spent his entire 38-year career making chips, and who’s now Intel’s top manufacturing scientist. “Nobody’s had the courage to change it.”
I know this is exactly the case for PCB manufacture and printing press plate making to lessen accidental exposure, so it's exactly like a red safelight in a darkroom.
Usually used dark red light, or yellow-green.
And I lived in absolutely typical apartment, and used for photography ordinary bathroom, but switched off normal lights and used special lights, and apartments become looking like them from fantastic films.
So, yes, my first education electronics and I've few times been at real fabs. At fabs there are two things which don't appear in typical homes - many devices emit ultraviolet and it is extremely powerful, so appear even through covers, or use open electric heaters, which emit red.
Main lights I have seen there, where just ordinary fluorescent lamps, but I sure, on more modern fabs, used special lamps or color filters, to filter out part of spectrum which could cause unnecessary additional dose for photo-chemistry.
So there are some pretty good reasons to not to increase uncontrolled UV light exposure.
So at fabs, usually, main light is not powerful, or have some color filters.
It's exactly analogous to red safe lights used for film print photography.