link: https://www.militaryaerospace.com/computers/article/16710194...
TSMC's oldest plant still in operation (Fab 2) started production in 1990. So far, the only fab they have closed is Fab 1.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...
Admittedly, leading-edge process is where all the excitement it, but the old fabs are fully depreciated and can remain profitable for decades.
Modern SMD stuff is really rubbish for learning electronics. It's nigh impossible to hand solder because all of it is tiny af, and since it's newer it's expensive and you don't get as many attempts. Luckily there's still an immense supply of arguably completely obsolete thruhole parts that are super easy to work with, can be breadboarded and bought for basically nothing.
SMD parts are much cheaper compared to THT in my experience. Which parts are you thinking of specifically?
I majored in CompSci but got my first job in embedded at a hardware manufacturer. IME it didn’t require many hours of practice to learn to solder e.g. 0603-parts. Around 4-5 hours of deliberate practice for me, although smaller can still be annoying.
I have slighty worse than average vision so personally need a magnifying glass or a microscope for 0402 and smaller, but I can do it and it looks pretty afterwards (says the HW techs).
I was about 5-6x slower than the HW techs at solder work and repair, so I didn’t solder something up every week/month. I can still mount a board easily with 0805s and 0603s even though it’s been a few years now.
I admit I'm really crap at accurate soldering so it might be more of a me issue, but I doubt I'm entirely alone in this.
It is easier than it looks IMO, though I did get some tips from our techs which likely accellerated my learning (e.g. compared to learning on your own).
With smaller (and thus lighter) parts, the surface tension helps pull the parts into place etc., so you get help on “pad-alignment”.
Hot air soldering gets more difficult though, as you risk blowing parts offboard :D
I don’t know the parts, but my experience is that everything SMD is cheaper than THT. Almost always. The hall effect sensor can likely be found cheaper in Sot23?
The only reason I ever saw for using THT parts, was the (typically) much higher power ratings.
At my previous job, a typical board with e.g. 6 layers and 500 components would have perhaps 5-10 THT parts and the rest in SMD (0805 and 0603 mostly).
YMMV and for hobbyists it doesn’t make a big difference.
SMD-soldering skills can be handy though. E.g. I’ve repaired a few of my friends’ TVs with broken backlights for pennies.
Agree with your post and this part especially. More flux means easier work, but more mess to clean up when done. Flux pens are practical.
I only used hot air for removing parts, but the techs who controlled it well absolutely loved it and were insanely productive.
I solder QFP by dragging a “saturated” tip across the leads and then wick up any excess solder if needed (e.g. if I bridged/shorted a few legs).
However in tough times, having the culture to change and deal with customers or use cases you wouldn't prefer to survive is a good sign. AMD during the bulldozer era, had many deals they didn't like or barely made money just to survive, it paid off with Ryzen, it can happen to Intel as well. Good to see Intel branching out and trying new things to turn the ship around.
[0] http://www.righto.com/2023/07/the-complex-history-of-intel-i...
So much for their monopoly.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/09/12/intel-is-on-li...
It’s pretty nuts reading The Atlantic’s piece from 10 years ago and then seeing where the company is now.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
they are also loosing revenue hard in multiple segments including their core high margin enterprise server chips and also not gaining foothold in others (mobile/lower power device or GPUs)
They need fresh revenue really quickly to keep markets happy on share price which has really tanked this year, also to keep the supply chain healthy and talent motivated
Any foundary business is always in need of cash, a leading edge foundary is $20-$30B outlay minimum these days , not many companies in the world are so flush they can easily spend $30B without sweating it
Increasingly, every "round of ammo" has a chip in it. Every missile, bomb, single-use drone, and artillery shell has sensors and guidance. These are expended in use.
Instead of maintaining these "rounds", the military simply asks for a new, improved, and more expensive version of them, and destroys / gives away the old versions.
It's not just one country buying these, it's the entirety of NATO.
Intel recently built expertise in this area, so I think they are a good match.
That is changing with the drone warfare becoming large part of the future wars. US military (and pretty much everyone else) will make drones major focus of advancement and there is definitely lot of money to be made by supplying chips for those.
My read is Intel isn't going for that trajectory anymore and stabilized for markets where politics can play a larger role.
"Stuck"? Generally speaking, they can charge an arm and a leg for those older parts due to small volume. When I previously worked at a company that supplied hardware for a military application, they were still buying decades old hardware at about a 10x markup from when it was still in production for the general commercial market.
Heck, in 2019 Global Foundries sold a 20 year old fab that IBM built in Fishkill to ON Semiconductor for $430m. IBM originally built it for ~$2.5B. You don't think they got their money's worth and then some? ON didn't buy it as an act of charity, they've clearly got a plan to continue printing money building chips out of that fab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlobalFoundries
https://www.semiconductor-technology.com/projects/ibm_fishki...
Unless they have really classified tech like a productively useful quantum computer or something, it’s just a better idea all around to use off the shelf or very slightly modified off the shelf parts. (Feature flags, extra testing, expanded environmental margins, etc, but not total redesigns)
Isn't this what every corporate wants? Steady supply of income with no R&D, marketing, etc.
Some costs that will crop up even without investing in R&D and maintenance: - Factory maintenance. The lights need to stay on, the floors need to be swept and the bearings need to remain greased. Things like ISO and security certifications also need to be kept up to date. - The longer a product runs, the more likely it is that the original employees on the production line retire or leave for another job. This means you'll need to be able to find and train new people for a job that uses tools and methodologies no longer used anywhere else. It will probably be more expensive to hire for those jobs than for jobs where people learn transferable skills that they could use in the rest of their careers. - After 40 years, many of the components in the production machinery will be difficult to come by. A CNC machine from that time might use the (then brand new) 286 processor. If it breaks, where would you source extra 286 processors? Alternatively you can redesign the process to use up-to-date components, but that costs a lot of extra money. - Usually the demand for components drops off over time as the world moves on to something more modern. For example, demand for components of older fighter jets will slowly drop off as new airframes are no longer being built and the existing ones slowly get taken out of service. This means you'll need to spread the fixed costs of the above points over fewer and fewer components over time. - Finally, the need for R&D and marketing doesn't actually go away. If you only focus on producing (say) targeting processors for the F16, your company will go out of business at the latest when the last F16 leaves service. Your shareholders will probably not be happy about that, so it's still important to invest in gaining new contracts too.
If that is the case you manufacture more than enough and put them on a shelf.
> Some costs that will crop up even without investing in R&D and maintenance
Obviously. You put those costs in the contract and make the costumer pay for them.
If they want to fab 3 chips a year that is going to cost them dearly. This is not a property of the old processes. This is a property of low volumes.
nothing wrong with this. Government pays for the product. The product should be serviceable whether the company becomes defunct or business shifts. At this point, military or consumer should be able to give blueprints of the parts to different manufacturer or manufacturer it themselves.
Data Rights - Every acquisitions contract includes data rights. The specific data varies by contract. For things like an LRU, the data rights may include schematics. This is, in theory, enough information to recreate the device but may leave out certain key proprietary pieces. Like if a 1980s era LRU had an M68k, no schematics from Motorola will be included. But the architecture is known so recreation is technically feasible. The schematics also offer a foundation for producing a like-product replacing the obsolete components, though a project like that can take years.
ICD - Interface Control Document. The device itself becomes a blackbox. Instead a description is provided, along with other requirements and spec documents, on how it behaves. The good ICDs are really enough to start a clean room project without ever needing to crack open the to-be-replaced devices. Unfortunately the good ones are rare, they often stop getting updated at some point and modern ICDs are shit compared to the documentation from last century.
COTS - DOD (and the US gov't in general) has had a major 30+ year push to go COTS as much as possible. Obviously this doesn't work for everything, but go back to that M68k example. There's no reason to ask for a custom chip when a COTS one will do. Same for other parts of major systems. Computer motherboards can be COTS (or very near) even if the chassis is bespoke to make it form and fit suitable for its intended environment. COTS, in theory, also makes it possible to do incremental refreshes more easily. Like replace that computer hardware in the custom chassis every 5 years, it's not trivial but it's a small jump and updating software components in such "short" (by DOD standards) increments is hardly onerous. In practice, updates may not happen for 20+ years which is a more substantial undertaking.
These, and other things that are supposed to be done in acquisitions, largely resolve the "What will we do in 20 years when the supplier has gone under" questions.
(alright, it has happened though that they needed to wheel out the old-timer who was around when the hardware was originally delivered, come integration time - since the way you hook up to the thing isn't always clearly described. But the software was fine!)
This technique is already done for things with long operational lifetimes. It would be nice if we made a distributed (geographically) wafer bank so that we will have a long supply of semiconductors, esp after a civilization scale catastrophe.
Moreover, the packaged chips typically require a much larger volume for their storage than the wafers. A wafer may contain many thousands of chips.
The wafers are normally stored in dry nitrogen, to avoid their chemical degradation during long term storage.
DOD is making a big bet that anything chip and silicon is going to be really hard to acquire past 2027.
This may be a great big gravy train for Intel.
It wasn't clear from what was said before the paywall whether Intel would be manufacturing products designed by the government or another third party, or if these are going to be Intel-designed products. (It's not all too out-of-the-ordinary for Intel or any other chip designer to make a variant of a product with certain application-specific tweaks for certain customers.) If Intel is designing the product, then that's a lot more than ordinary foundry services.