Jim Keller's startup is building a factory to mass-produce small chip fabs
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
I still recall being amazed reading and seeing it for the first time, and I have been eagerly awaiting to see what he been up to since starting Atomic Semi.
I would assume that re-targeting a design to a different fab's process would change enough about it that you might as well just do verification in simulation rather than sidetrack through Fab2.
The more components can be produced in such a way, the better. Chips currently are quite an exception to that.
Jim won't have a say in the matter.
> Fab2 now operates three sites: a 120,000 square foot facility in Austin serves as the new headquarters for research and production, a 30,000 square foot site in Lockhart houses the "fab fab" itself, and the original 25,000 square foot "garage fab" remains in San Francisco.
> Fab2 said it shifted its hiring focus to Texas after four years in California
Is California not what it used to be for startups? (I'm not saying Texas doesn't have an history of tech startups: it had the likes of Texas Instruments and many others in the early days)
E-beam machines work fine for prototyping. People have been doing that since the 1970s. But they're slow. It's a prototyping technology. The sort of thing that "3D print everything" people like. E-beam machines with many beams have been mentioned, but never seemed to be worth it.
There are companies which offer E-beam IC fab as a service. Some cater to DoD and the intelligence community.[2] (That's for when you really can't trust your supply chain and want your own ICs fabbed.) Others are more commercial, but are in China.[3]
They claim to be building all the machines needed for a fab. But they don't have a list, or pictures. There's a used market in that gear, and no reason to build it all yourself.
It's not a fundamentally bad idea, but the hype is strong here.
[1] https://www.machinio.com/semiconductors
> only really suits prototyping and low-volume runs rather than high-volume production at commercial foundries
Wouldn't many 1000s of mini-fabs make for a significant combined manufacturing capacity?
Unless they offer some amazing analog capabilities.
Silicon transistors with such gate lengths would not work, because the too short gate could not close the conduction channel (the minimum gate length with silicon is likely to be greater than 10 nm, even with gate-around transistors).
The masks used for deep UV lithography or for any other kind of high-resolution lithography are also made with electron-beam lithography.
Therefore it is obvious that anything that you can do in a form of lithography that uses masks you can do with electron-beam lithography.
Using directly electron-beam lithography skips the production of masks and their use.
This is a huge cost reduction in the cost of processing a single wafer (which may have hundreds or thousands of chips). However the processing throughput is orders of magnitude lower than when using masks. For very high-volume production, the costs of the masks and of the deep UV lithography are divided over millions or billions of chips, so they are reduced to a reasonable fraction of the cost, which is compensated by the high productivity.
A small fab that uses electron-beam lithography can do everything that TSMC can do, and in a much simpler way.
Its problems are not technical, but economical.
The costs of producing chips are much lower than for TSMC, but the production rate is also orders of magnitude lower.
So they can be used only to produce prototypes or devices for niche applications, where the small quantities needed would never allow them to be produced at a big fab.
On the other hand, if such small fabs could be themselves mass produced, so that their cost could become low enough, then using a great number of such small fabs could satisfy the requirements in semiconductor devices and ICs of most not too big countries, and this style of production would be greatly preferable to what exists today as the end point of a long chain of acquisitions and mergers, that has resulted in a handful of SOTA manufacturers in the entire world.
Ideally, there would still exist big fabless IC design companies, like Intel, AMD or NVIDIA, but they would design for a standardized CMOS fabrication process, not for a proprietary process with secret design rules, like those of TSMC.
Then such designs would be licensed for production in distributed small fabs. Only such a system would remove the dependence of the entire world on a quasi-monopolistic system of production, where the destruction of a single fab could cripple most of the world.