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The windows are made by Gentex (https://www.gentex.com)

Yes but there is a huge technology gap. example: Automakers need a lot more small low-power MCUs built on ~130/90nm process. A 14nm fab that started 2 years ago is never going to be producing those 130/90nm MCUs. Furthermore, the semi toolmakers that produce the tools needed to build 130/90nm chips stopped making those tools years ago. This is a rabbit-hole that just keeps going. The problem isn't going away soon or easily.

Honestly, the risks of just-in-time have always been know. The problem is that holding excess inventory and/or reserve capacity costs real money, and somebody has to pay for it. Investors/managers drive out wasted costs or eventually they go out of business. (Absent government support.)

It takes >$10B and >2 years to build a fab which will be effectively obsolete ~2 years after it opens. If it doesn't open on schedule or is underloaded, the ROI goes negative almost immediately. (I somewhat oversimplified this of course but it's to make the point.)

In practical terms, the government is just too slow to actually help. They always shoot behind the target. The semiconductor market is cyclical. By the time the CHIPS Act, etc, actually get passed and implemented, the market will already be in oversupply and voters/politicians will complain about government handouts for these companies.

Historically, excess wafer fab capacity is what bankrupts semiconductor companies. An underloaded fab very rapidly eats up profit. Over the last 10 years, the industry has become very cautious not to overbuild capacity. We have now arrived at the opposite end of the long term (~10 year) cycle and we have accumulated a serious underinvestment in capacity.

Battleship USS Missouri also ran aground in Chesapeake Bay in 1950.

the battleship remained stuck for over two weeks before being freed from the sand. The ship was so damaged that she had to return to port and enter dry dock for repairs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1950_USS_Missouri_grounding

My favorite hobby is is inhaling O2 and exhaling CO2.

"travelling"

"legitimately needs to be done" - who decides what is "legitimate"?

I agree we cannot burden poorer people. I think the least-worst way to handle the whole situation is with a carbon-tax and dividend.

I agree! Add the cost of CO2 into the price of gas. But don't ban inefficient speciality cars. I happen to be someone who really enjoys driving performance cars that happen to get really poor fuel economy. I have no problem paying the cost of the CO2 I generate. But I find it very irritating when people say we need to ban these cars outright.

Many people have hobbies that drive CO2 emissions. Should we ban all of these too?

I could never get my RDP to work until I switched to using a local account. Now I know why I was pulling my hair out trying to get it working.

I am not defending anything. I am not saying it's the right way to do it. I am just reporting my own observation of how the industry currently operates, from the perspective of someone working in the industry.

There is a video called "Silicon Run" (1996) which I feel gives a good overview of semiconductor manufacturing. This video is now quite old, but the major principles remain the same. Seems to be available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3XTWXRj24GM

Fairchild was acquired by Onsemi

The very long form is an EE degree with an emphasis in VLSI.

In seriousness, there just isn't as much information about semiconductors publicly available like there is in software. If you can make your question a little more specific I will try to help.

I think the chart is meant to be an approximated summary, not a precise timeline down to sub-year intervals. Even though Intel has fallen somewhat behind compared to norm, I think they should still be considered "leading edge". The "Intel 7" process (formerly known as Intel 10nm process) is comparable in transistors per mm^2 with TSMC 7nm. Really, we should all drop the "nm" naming conventions and simply go with transistors per mm^2 for a given design pattern.

Semiconductor industry is almost all B2B. People don't invest much time into trying to make technical content look aesthetically pleasing. It only gets read by other technical experts who don't value aesthetics as long as the information is clear.

It is a little bit dated. But the core concepts are all still valid. I posted it because - as someone working in the industry - I find it is somewhat rare to find a public article that attempts to explain the "big picture" landscape of the semiconductor ecosystem.

There is another problem: all of the equipment makers have stopped producing the "old" tools that are used for >40nm process 8 inch wafers. People in these "old" fabs seriously go on eBay to buy used parts to replace broken parts inside tools in their fab because the original tool maker stopped making spare parts years ago.

If you want to see something fun, go check the size of the tires on your car (printed on the wall of the tire). It will read something like "245/35R18", where 245 is the section width in millimeters and 18 is the diameter in inches. All standard tire sizes use a combination of inches and millimeters, haha.

> Are you sure? TSMC definitely does packaging. And it seems like it would be crazy to ship a delicate unpackaged die to a different factory when you could just keep it in a clean room and do everything in one place. I think it would be mad for Intel not to do packaging there.

True, the very advanced packaging techniques, such as TSMC CoWoS or Intel EMIB, are done at the fabs by those companies. These packages are for very high performance multi-chip interconnects. In both cases, the "package" itself actually is partially constructed from silicon, so we are kind of blurring the lines between what is "chip" and what is "package". The vast majority of chips do not use packages anywhere near this advanced and are not done at fabs.

Also, it's not crazy to ship finished wafers (i.e. "unpackaged die"); it's standard practice. Once the final process steps are complete in the fab, the chip is not as sensitive to fine particles any more. The wafers get loaded into cassettes then vacuum-sealed in anti-static bags. They ship out to the backend assembly sites just fine. In fact, globally, there are probably ~100,000 wafers shipped like this every day.

> Intel sells lots of CPUs that aren't soldered to PCBs.

True. But if you are buying an LGA socketed Intel CPU, the silicon die had to first be mounted on a substrate and the heatspreader attached. That wasn't done at fab, it was done at backend assembly. Ever notice that Intel CPU's often say something about "assembled in Malaysia" on top? That's because it was assembled in Malaysia. Intel does not have any semiconductor fabs in Malaysia, meaning, they fabbed it in one place and assembled it in another.

If you are a company like Dell or HP and you are buying the laptop BGA CPUs, Intel still had to assemble those into the BGA package before shipping to Dell/HP. And the BGA package assembly also is not done at fab.

It's all about cost. The assembly and test is the "low tech" part of semiconductor manufacturing and can be done well in Asia by workforces that are not as highly educated as those you need to run a fab. US and western economies have always focused on doing the highest value add portions of manufacturing domestically (where the highly educated workforce is key) while outsourcing the lower value add (lower margin) portions of the supply chain.

Consumers demand low cost. Many times they just buy the cheaper widget, because most people are not even capable of distinguishing the differences in performance or quality between two different widgets. But the difference in price is obvious to everyone and so most people just use that. The pressure of reducing every single penny out of the cost or semiconductors is enormous.

Top 10 OSAT (outsourced assembly and test) companies: https://evertiq.com/news/51003

Silicon fabs do not make server boards. They just produce the silicon wafer i.e. "die" of a semiconductor device. Most die must be assembled into a package before they can be used. The die packaging aka "backend" is almost never done at the same place as the fab. Most backend is in Taiwan or Malaysia or China. Even after the die is packaged, it needs to be mounted on a complete PCB with all the other components. Intel typically does not do PCB assembly, they mostly just sell assembled CPUs (or other devices) to other companies that do the PCB assembly.

There are always unknowns, but Intel is a much more reliable partner than Foxconn. The Wisconsin Foxconn deal smelled very fishy from day 1 IMO.

The Digi-Key price is $4. The direct price when buying millions of units will be a fraction of the Digi-Key price.

display-switch has saved me so much time and has been so useful during work from home. thank you to the author.

Not true. I run display-switch on only one of my two computers and the monitor switches back and forth with my USB switch.