How does this make any financial sense?
So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia.
Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin.
So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo...
That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship.
Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it.
The interest you'd pay just losing a couple days in transit time would exceed the cost of purchasing a dedicated private jet and the crew to fly it.
Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
Guys these are microchips on wafers. You can put a million dollars worth in your jacket pocket. They aren't being shipped in containers.
Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.
A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³.
A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.
However, low-end processors will be worth radically less ($100 CPUs aren't 10x smaller) and things like top-end FPGAs will be worth substantially more. An Agilex 7 can be $40,000 and if it's got less then 4 grams (around 1700mm², or 41mm*41mm), the wafer is worth over $10k/gram. The entire chip is 56x56, and from the package drawing, the die appears to be around 30x30, so it exceeds the threshold.
This is assuming all the value of the retail price is the main wafer, which is also not true.
Thousands per gram, certainly seems possible, though I doubt it's even that on average across all chips, and considering that there is non-wafer content in the price. Tens of thousands is probably pushing it. However, it's certainly likely to be rather more than gold in terms of specific value ($100/g, ish). Harder to fence, though.
^certainly there's activity in that space
If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy.
Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4
It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box.
basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo...
And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
But you are right on that it is CoWoS which is the missing ingredient.