It's not a bad argument just an one lacking some information on how this all works. And sincerely that isn't meant as an insult...it's just reality. Ask me abou

It's not a bad argument just an one lacking some information on how this all works. And sincerely that isn't meant as an insult...it's just reality. Ask me about surgery and I'll shrug and say 'i got nothing yo' Everything in semiconductor is basically incomprehensible in scale. A scanner (i.e., the photo lithography projection tool) takes about 2 seconds to fully expose a wafer. that wafer probably has 100 individual chips on it each of which have around 2 billion transistors. That means that tool is helping create 100 billion transistors a second. The great grand parent comment is right...but the lose of that is probably on the range of one-two weeks production. retrofitting the fab like you suggest, and to be clear it isn't a fundamentally bad idea, would cost billions and take months if not years. What you propose is technically correct but business irrelevant. Long term here means a week or so...it's expensive but rare. They don't play with 'crude hacks' because you don't know the implications of that hack 10 years from now when the chip is running part of the stock market. It's just an industry that is hard to process, whether you work in it or not, because of the scale and the precision.