3 ms·
You are kidding right? The machines at TSMC would be at 100% utilization on million dollar jobs, management would never accept downtime for maintenance for sof
by delfinom 8y ago
You are kidding right?
The machines at TSMC would be at 100% utilization on million dollar jobs, management would never accept downtime for maintenance for software updates that could introduce bugs.
Its one thing for consumer devices to receive updates, its a completely different ballgame with industrial. Downtime due to anything can be millions of dollars per hour in losses. So it comes down to what could cause more monetary loss, downtime due to hacks or downtime due to bugs introduced.
"If it works why break it".
Its the same reason why there are production lines where physically, hardware could be replaced and improved to reduce wear, reliability, power usage, etc (even things like motors) but they arent, for decades. Only when things start costing money outside the original design do engineers perform upgrades.
- MarkSweep 8y agoExactly. You can say "oh, just take the machine out of production for a bit do software patching". However that reduces the uptime for your tool which will require buying more of them to get the same throughput. More tools is not only capex, but also space on the factory floor. This is extra true for my company. We sell sorters, which don't actually do anything useful in terms of processing the wafers. The tools just shuffle the wafers between FOUPs. While these tools help customers optimize processes by changing batch sizes and such, they really want to have as few non-process tools as possible. So uptime is really important.