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"It costs more to make a chip than a plane" - nope, not if you don't build the fabs as Intel does. Of course Bloomberg (or at least many people there) should an

by _yosefk 10y ago

"It costs more to make a chip than a plane" - nope, not if you don't build the fabs as Intel does. Of course Bloomberg (or at least many people there) should and does know better.

nn3 10y ago
I'm sure Intel would be happy learn from you how they could avoid investing all that money. To misquote George Burns, too bad that all the people who know how to build fabs are busy hanging out on HN instead...
- jandrese 10y ago
  It's easy to build a cheap fab. You just target 45nm and use the old tried and true tech.
- trsohmers 10y ago
  The point is that if you have a new chip design as a fabless semiconductor start up (like mine), you can get a chip fabbed on a fairly new process node (28nm) for less than $250k for a small quantity run, and go into production for under $5 million through a pure play fab like Global Foundries, TSMC, Samsung, UMC, SMIC, etc.
  - nn3 10y ago
    Right. Who need power plants when the power is coming out of the wall plug. See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can use it.
    - trsohmers 10y ago
      Oh of course there needs to be fabs, but plenty of them exist. All I was saying is that if you want to make a chip, you don't need to take on Intel's capex.
      - wolrah 10y ago
        Then you end up like AMD, with designs that have to be cut back and compromised when a third-party fab doesn't manage to do what they expect on a new process. There's something to be said for tight integration between fab and design when you're trying to go in to uncharted territory. If you don't need to be at the edge of process technology, you're completely right of course.
        _yosefk 10y ago
        Why do you have to be like AMD - why can't you be like Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, or, well, about any successful/large chip maker other than Intel and Samsung? Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much more but it's still millions, not billions.
        trsohmers 10y ago
        Our next shuttle run is on 16nm... Depending on a bunch of different options, it is "only" ~2-4x the cost of a 28nm run (and should be declining in the next year). Doing a full mask set is still extremely expensive though (~$5-10m range)
feelix 10y ago
It amused me that they were comparing the cost of mass producing a chip to the cost of producing a single plane.
CamperBob2 10y ago
This article is full of crap like that. Periodically, the wafer is washed using a form of water so pure it isn’t found in nature. It’s so pure it’s lethal. If you drank enough of it, it would pull essential minerals out of your cells and kill you. I guess this bit of silliness is our Western version of Korean fan death. It's a commonly-repeated myth that humans need minerals in their water, or that distilled water has meaningful biological effects that "normal" water doesn't. But... Bohr’s solution, unveiled in 2007, was to coat parts of the transistor with hafnium, a silvery metal not found in nature ... somebody had to make that up completely at random. Who did that, and why did they do it? What goes through a journalist's (or an editor's) head in the process of putting a statement like that in print? The article is actually pretty interesting... but how much of it am I supposed to believe?
- TFortunato 10y ago
  FWIW, they aren't talking about distilled water, they are talking about DI water (deionized), which is different and more reactive / corrosive. Yeah, a sip isn't going kill you, but I wouldn't make a habit of it either. http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/ss/Distilled-Versus-Deionized-Water.htm http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/ss/Distilled-Ve...
  - CamperBob2 10y ago
    Sorry, there is absolutely no difference from a physiological point of view. I've had this argument on here before and am not interested in revisiting it. Suffice it to say that you will be able to find plenty of sources for various old wives' tales along the lines of "Don't drink distilled/DI water, it'll kill you/rot your teeth/give you an itchy rash." None of them will include respected medical texts, legitimate peer-reviewed journals, or even blog posts written by people who remember what their fifth grade Health textbook had to say about the operation of the human kidney. It's worth objecting to this kind of mythology because some people may assume that the converse implication in the Bloomberg article is also true, and that drinking arbitrarily-large amounts of "normal" water is harmless. The truth is that you will die if you force yourself to drink too much DI or distilled water, and you will die just as quickly if you drink the same amount of tap water.

by _yosefk 10y ago

"It costs more to make a chip than a plane" - nope, not if you don't build the fabs as Intel does. Of course Bloomberg (or at least many people there) should and does know better.

nn3 10y ago

I'm sure Intel would be happy learn from you how they could avoid investing all that money. To misquote George Burns, too bad that all the people who know how to build fabs are busy hanging out on HN instead...

jandrese 10y ago
It's easy to build a cheap fab. You just target 45nm and use the old tried and true tech.
trsohmers 10y ago
The point is that if you have a new chip design as a fabless semiconductor start up (like mine), you can get a chip fabbed on a fairly new process node (28nm) for less than $250k for a small quantity run, and go into production for under $5 million through a pure play fab like Global Foundries, TSMC, Samsung, UMC, SMIC, etc.
- nn3 10y ago
  Right. Who need power plants when the power is coming out of the wall plug. See the problem? Someone has to build the fab in the first place so you can use it.
  - trsohmers 10y ago
    Oh of course there needs to be fabs, but plenty of them exist. All I was saying is that if you want to make a chip, you don't need to take on Intel's capex.
    - wolrah 10y ago
      Then you end up like AMD, with designs that have to be cut back and compromised when a third-party fab doesn't manage to do what they expect on a new process. There's something to be said for tight integration between fab and design when you're trying to go in to uncharted territory. If you don't need to be at the edge of process technology, you're completely right of course.
      - _yosefk 10y ago
        Why do you have to be like AMD - why can't you be like Apple, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, or, well, about any successful/large chip maker other than Intel and Samsung? Regarding the edge of technology - Intel doesn't beat others to a new node by making both chips and fabs, it would beat others even if it was only building fabs. And it's not like TSMC is that much behind Intel. Grandparent who mentioned 28nm could mention 16nm except that there the masks will costs much more but it's still millions, not billions.
        trsohmers 10y ago
        Our next shuttle run is on 16nm... Depending on a bunch of different options, it is "only" ~2-4x the cost of a 28nm run (and should be declining in the next year). Doing a full mask set is still extremely expensive though (~$5-10m range)

feelix 10y ago

It amused me that they were comparing the cost of mass producing a chip to the cost of producing a single plane.

CamperBob2 10y ago

This article is full of crap like that. Periodically, the wafer is washed using a form of water so pure it isn’t found in nature. It’s so pure it’s lethal. If you drank enough of it, it would pull essential minerals out of your cells and kill you. I guess this bit of silliness is our Western version of Korean fan death. It's a commonly-repeated myth that humans need minerals in their water, or that distilled water has meaningful biological effects that "normal" water doesn't. But... Bohr’s solution, unveiled in 2007, was to coat parts of the transistor with hafnium, a silvery metal not found in nature ... somebody had to make that up completely at random. Who did that, and why did they do it? What goes through a journalist's (or an editor's) head in the process of putting a statement like that in print? The article is actually pretty interesting... but how much of it am I supposed to believe?

TFortunato 10y ago
FWIW, they aren't talking about distilled water, they are talking about DI water (deionized), which is different and more reactive / corrosive. Yeah, a sip isn't going kill you, but I wouldn't make a habit of it either. http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/ss/Distilled-Versus-Deionized-Water.htm http://chemistry.about.com/od/waterchemistry/ss/Distilled-Ve...
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  Sorry, there is absolutely no difference from a physiological point of view. I've had this argument on here before and am not interested in revisiting it. Suffice it to say that you will be able to find plenty of sources for various old wives' tales along the lines of "Don't drink distilled/DI water, it'll kill you/rot your teeth/give you an itchy rash." None of them will include respected medical texts, legitimate peer-reviewed journals, or even blog posts written by people who remember what their fifth grade Health textbook had to say about the operation of the human kidney. It's worth objecting to this kind of mythology because some people may assume that the converse implication in the Bloomberg article is also true, and that drinking arbitrarily-large amounts of "normal" water is harmless. The truth is that you will die if you force yourself to drink too much DI or distilled water, and you will die just as quickly if you drink the same amount of tap water.