4 ms·
Out of curiosity, do you know what factors are mainly driving the costs so high? Thinking about it naively, I can guess at a few possibilities: - it's highly
by teraflop 7y ago
Out of curiosity, do you know what factors are mainly driving the costs so high?
Thinking about it naively, I can guess at a few possibilities:
- it's highly labor-intensive
- it requires highly specialized skills that command incredibly high prices on the labor market
- it requires lots of prototyping iterations that require expensive materials
- the prototypes are produced on machinery with high opportunity costs
- IP licensing costs
I'm wondering if one of these in particular is the dominant cause, or if it's all of them in conjunction, or if there are other major factors I'm not thinking of.
- ekianjo 7y agothe cost of highly specialized machinery is certainly a big driver. Plus that machinery is basically thrown away every time you go to a thinner process. Also, figuring out how to maximize yields to an acceptable level must be a lot of experimentation.
- pkaye 7y agoI used to work on R&D on development of those expensive FAB machines. There was lots of expensive materials to meet extreme requirements. The process chambers were hot with corrosive gases. For example you couldn't use cheap o-rings. Instead of $30 standard o-rings, we would need $3000 chemical resistant o-rings that don't disintegrate with time. You had to trace down minute sources of contamination. And there was lots of iterations of prototyping to get things just right.
- klyrs 7y agoLithography is actually a huge challenge, and is becoming extremely complex https://semiengineering.com/7nm-fab-challenges/ https://semiengineering.com/7nm-fab-challenges/
- brennanpeterson 7y agoA process cost is basically the 2 years of Fab time. And a Fab is expensive due to the capital equipment (your opportunity cost). A 10B Fab Costa about 2B per year, thus process development is 4B. I think those design costs are nonsensical. There are major projects done by groups of 100 or fewer engineers. A really unique design can cost that much, but a licensed design built.on standard cells is less. That is how rocketchip, RiscV, and others get by. As an approximation, every M$ is 2 engineer years. A 100M$ design is...200 engineer years. With an ARM license and other IP, that is likely manageable. There is a large infrastructure of design tools that keep design costs constrained per design. Fab costs are not so easily limited....
- JudgeWapner 7y agoI just quit a gig at a semiconductor supplier that makes EUV light. Keep in mind this is just one major component in the chain: - EUV comes from a plasma of metal created in a vacuum chamber. - the plasma is created by concentrating a beam of light on a tiny pellet of molten metal - that beam of light is a 25kw laser, which is borderline weapons-grade. To the point that countries hesitate to even allow it to be imported. - the laser must be pulsed precisely to vaporize the metal as its flying through the chamber - residue from the metal vapor quickly builds up and deteriorates the process getting this stuff to work requires armies of engineers and scientists. the machines themselves are the size of a tour bus.