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Basically, yes. Fabs are hugely expensive and they can only pump out so many wafers. The article is saying that it looks like demand is outstripping the capacit

Basically, yes. Fabs are hugely expensive and they can only pump out so many wafers. The article is saying that it looks like demand is outstripping the capacity of the fabs to increase supply.

comboy 10y ago
Last one - so if a fab can produce wafers at say 14nm - is there something else that can be stopping it from producing 14nm NAND flash? I mean apart from the quality. I imagined fabs like 3d printers. I thought the toughest part is the design, and once you have it, there's now plenty of places where you can print it.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > is there something else that can be stopping it from producing 14nm NAND flash? I mean apart from the quality. Well, you'd need the machines for that – there’s only a handful of companies able to build the EUV lithographic machines for that, most of them small German companies with a few dozen to hundred employees. And they can’t just increase production.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    Or rather, it takes years. Of course they can increase production eventually... But the silicon factories cost billions each, so no-one is going to scale up because of a temporary shortage. The same, even more so, for the factory-factories.
  - linker3000 10y ago
    The fabs don't want to increase production of current 'old' technologies and are transitioning to smaller die processes and ramping up 3D production so there's a perfect storm of increasing demand and fab refurbishments reducing availability.
  - mattthebaker 10y ago
    In logic, smaller is faster: less capacitance, shorter channels, and thinner oxides means faster switching. In memory, smaller means less space to store your bits. I remember a quote from somewhere that with TLC at 20nm, you could lose only 1 ELECTRON PER YEAR from the floating gate to meet the memory retention spec. Also, NAND had smaller feature sizes than logic for some time, before they really hit the wall. They innovated a lot of advanced techniques like quad patterning for memory cells. It helps in memory that you are optimizing for one and only one cell.
    - comboy 10y ago
      Thanks!
- wmf 10y ago
  Flash fabs are different than logic fabs (that's about the extent of my understanding so I won't try to explain why). Also, logic fabs may not have much idle capacity either.
- rhino369 10y ago
  Design for stuff like nand includes a bunch of process steps that have a huge impact on the devices. NAND might require different equipment from what is already being used. It all requires intense calibration and many engineers with quite a lot of experience. Intel planned (don't know if they ended up doing it) to convert a plant built in 2010 to memory fabrication and it was going to cost 3.5 billion dollars and take years. It's not plug and play.
- wtallis 10y ago
  High density chip fabrication processes are not commodiy services. Each foundry's process has its own design rules that your chip needs to take into account. And that's for logic. 3D NAND fabrication requires different materials and methods than logic fabrication, and each of the four manufacturers has their own design with its own manufacturing challenges. At least one or two of them have had to make significant adjustments in their fundamental memory cell design between their first announced prototypes and the shipping products that have layer counts high enough to offer competitive cost/GB.

Basically, yes. Fabs are hugely expensive and they can only pump out so many wafers. The article is saying that it looks like demand is outstripping the capacity of the fabs to increase supply.

comboy 10y ago

Last one - so if a fab can produce wafers at say 14nm - is there something else that can be stopping it from producing 14nm NAND flash? I mean apart from the quality. I imagined fabs like 3d printers. I thought the toughest part is the design, and once you have it, there's now plenty of places where you can print it.

kuschku 10y ago
> is there something else that can be stopping it from producing 14nm NAND flash? I mean apart from the quality. Well, you'd need the machines for that – there’s only a handful of companies able to build the EUV lithographic machines for that, most of them small German companies with a few dozen to hundred employees. And they can’t just increase production.
- Filligree 10y ago
  Or rather, it takes years. Of course they can increase production eventually... But the silicon factories cost billions each, so no-one is going to scale up because of a temporary shortage. The same, even more so, for the factory-factories.
- linker3000 10y ago
  The fabs don't want to increase production of current 'old' technologies and are transitioning to smaller die processes and ramping up 3D production so there's a perfect storm of increasing demand and fab refurbishments reducing availability.
- mattthebaker 10y ago
  In logic, smaller is faster: less capacitance, shorter channels, and thinner oxides means faster switching. In memory, smaller means less space to store your bits. I remember a quote from somewhere that with TLC at 20nm, you could lose only 1 ELECTRON PER YEAR from the floating gate to meet the memory retention spec. Also, NAND had smaller feature sizes than logic for some time, before they really hit the wall. They innovated a lot of advanced techniques like quad patterning for memory cells. It helps in memory that you are optimizing for one and only one cell.
  - comboy 10y ago
    Thanks!
wmf 10y ago
Flash fabs are different than logic fabs (that's about the extent of my understanding so I won't try to explain why). Also, logic fabs may not have much idle capacity either.
rhino369 10y ago
Design for stuff like nand includes a bunch of process steps that have a huge impact on the devices. NAND might require different equipment from what is already being used. It all requires intense calibration and many engineers with quite a lot of experience. Intel planned (don't know if they ended up doing it) to convert a plant built in 2010 to memory fabrication and it was going to cost 3.5 billion dollars and take years. It's not plug and play.
wtallis 10y ago
High density chip fabrication processes are not commodiy services. Each foundry's process has its own design rules that your chip needs to take into account. And that's for logic. 3D NAND fabrication requires different materials and methods than logic fabrication, and each of the four manufacturers has their own design with its own manufacturing challenges. At least one or two of them have had to make significant adjustments in their fundamental memory cell design between their first announced prototypes and the shipping products that have layer counts high enough to offer competitive cost/GB.