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Comment by politelemon | Hacker News Reader

Please educate me! I often hear 'billions' quoted in chip factory related deals. What is it about chip manufacturing that's costing so much, which requires such a scale of investment? Is it the R&D, or are the factories too sophisticated, or are there too many people involved, or something else?

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All of the above.

You need thousands of highly skilled engineers to operate an advanced fab. You need extremely advanced and expensive specialized equipment - look up ASML for a general idea of what this equipment does. You need a huge, purpose-built cleanroom that is many orders of magnitude “cleaner” than an operating room. You need a structure (and location) that has virtually zero vibration or noise. You need an constant, high-volume supply of a bunch of resources including water, power, and sand. And the list goes on.

Edit: Good video on ASML and semiconductor fabrication equipment in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8

Is it true that it's common TSMC practice to use PhD:s to continously babysit and tweak manufacturing processes? Does Intel handle that aspect differently?

Someone more knowledgeable can probably chime in, but my understanding is that, yes, fabs in general do employ a good number of PhDs.

Why is this a bad thing?

Is it really "all of the above?" The R&D is obviously very expensive as well, but I'm under the impression that the number in this sort of headline is usually the actual cost of the factory. (Although I guess money is fungible)

I’m not an expert on the financials, but R&D costs need to be recouped somehow. My uneducated guess is that R&D expenditures are amortized across fabs in the form of indirect costs.

> water

Even simple things like "water" is not just water but instead you need ultrapure water. The machines that purify water to the purity semiconductor industry needs it are not cheap.

Fabricating chips is the most sophisticated manufacturing that humans have ever built. Key dimensions in a single transistor are about the length of 100 hydrogen atoms. It takes a lot of technology to control things at that scale, and build billions of them in one chip.

What's always blown me away is that chips are built up in layers. These layers are built up by lithography, which involves depositing an extremely thin sheet of material and then etching out the pattern for wires, etc. The etching requires accurately exposing a mask pattern on the layer. Each subsequent layer must perfectly align with the layer below, or the chip is dead. We're talking 1 to 2nm alignment (millionths of a mm) . So a 'printing head' must move accross the wafer stepping accross for each chip and land exactly over the previous layer. The stepping is extremely quick. So move 20cm and stop within 1nm, that's orders of mangintude in speed and accuracy. consistently. Jesus, how do they build these things!

These processes are so complex that it takes months for a single wafer to be processed from one end to the other, and wafers aren't like a fine wine that's left alone for long.

If you are not from the US or Canada remember Billions are Milliards for the rest of us.

Oddly enough, the same difference exists between Portugal's portuguese (original) and Brazil's (colony) :-)

See "How big is a billion?" by Numberphile:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

(Given a choice, I would go with the long system, but sadly that doesn't seem to be the timeline we live in.)

Some of the machines are already 100s of millions of $.

Very expensive equipment.

Ultra high precision set up of the equipment.

Storing, using and disposing of some very toxic chemicals.

Convincing ultra specialist, high demand/skill/income engineers to relocate to place X.

The newer chip fabs, eg. TSMC N5, and upcoming N3 cost around $20 billion. This Italian plant is not for fab, but for dicing the wafers, packaging, etc. The advanced fab processes used by Apple, Qualcomm, NVidea, Samsung, Intel (soon), and others rely on ASML's EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) lithography (for fine lines in printing. Each succeeding process has more layers done with the EUV thus requires more of these machines and the cost is around $160 million each. A newer version, for processes such as Intel plans in having in production in 2025, costs about $330 million each. Again, many of these machines are needed for each wafer fab.

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