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I imagine that a Chinese manufacturer will eventually also play a role, since it's a strategic priority for the PRC to be self sufficient in terms of semi-condu

I imagine that a Chinese manufacturer will eventually also play a role, since it's a strategic priority for the PRC to be self sufficient in terms of semi-conductor production. The PRC (most probably) has the 'advantage' of a vast spy network in Taiwan, and (likely) in TSMC. Not to mention that salaries in China tend to be higher, leading to a brain-drain TW -> CN.

bsder 7y ago
Everybody in the business knows the secrets anyway. Institutional knowledge is the thing that is terribly difficult to transfer. Putting together a fab is money, money and more money combined with enough smart folks providing continuous effort to actually solve problems. It's the "solve problems" rather than "cover up problems" where China often breaks down. People forget that the US didn't just magically become a semiconductor powerhouse. It was thanks to VHSIC, the VLSI Project, and other initiatives--a multi-year concerted effort by all the US semiconductor industry and the US Federal Government--because they were terrified of (don't laugh now) the Japanese. DARPA gets all the press for the Internet, but the actual semiconductor technology that made the chips that powered the computers and equipment behind the Internet was probably far more important.
- GregarianChild 7y ago
  Everybody in the business knows the secrets anyway. That's so interesting. How does this knowledge (the secrets) transfer between individuals, in a way that doesn't generalise to teams? I'm asking because I've just been asked to build a research team ... (and one of my goals is to open all our results).
  - bsder 7y ago
    The dirty secret of semiconductor manufacturing is that there is a LOT of cargo culting--so nobody knows what all the essential knobs are. This is true practically any time you have an extremely complicated process with lots of steps--repeatability is difficult--and it's not limited to semiconductors. It is exacerbated when the line starts making real money once it is up an running--nobody wants to touch anything for fear of breaking it. For example, chemical mechanical polishing has some basic principles, but the full recipe for the polish process is voodoo. What kind of pressure profile? What formula of slurry? How long? You can steal the "full formula" ... but then discover it doesn't work in your fab (this is typical). Why? Who knows? Is this wafer too thick? Is the layer too hard? Is this polishing machine somehow different? Perhaps the machine operator learned to tweak the "documented formula" under certain conditions? This is also why Intel makes a development fab and then stamps them out literally identically. That's what gives (gave?) Intel its absolutely insane yields. A classic problem in this was the formula for the spacing/aerogel material in US nuclear bombs. The factory shut down, but nobody really noticed until they ran out of material. By then the factory was long enough gone that a new one had to be built--and, of course, the new material was useless. They had to embark on a research quest to figure out what significant information had been overlooked. Another good example is injection molding lines. Lots of the time, when there is an injection molding problem the first solution is to lengthen the injection molding time by 10%. The people on that shift simply shrug and go on with life. That wasn't actually the problem (for example, maybe the incoming plastic pellets were too wet) but the people with a production quota don't care. It probably takes an old dude with a grey beard to grab a handful of plastic pellets and test them for water content, yell at the people who were supposed to prepare the plastic bits, and dial the speed back up to where it is supposed to be. That old dude is your institutional knowledge. If you don't have that grey beard, you simply lost 10% production capacity permanently. Have enough of those events and your injection molding company goes bankrupt.
    - jason0597 7y ago
      This is really interesting, I didn't know any of this. Do you work in this field professionally?

bsder 7y ago

Everybody in the business knows the secrets anyway. Institutional knowledge is the thing that is terribly difficult to transfer. Putting together a fab is money, money and more money combined with enough smart folks providing continuous effort to actually solve problems. It's the "solve problems" rather than "cover up problems" where China often breaks down. People forget that the US didn't just magically become a semiconductor powerhouse. It was thanks to VHSIC, the VLSI Project, and other initiatives--a multi-year concerted effort by all the US semiconductor industry and the US Federal Government--because they were terrified of (don't laugh now) the Japanese. DARPA gets all the press for the Internet, but the actual semiconductor technology that made the chips that powered the computers and equipment behind the Internet was probably far more important.

GregarianChild 7y ago
Everybody in the business knows the secrets anyway. That's so interesting. How does this knowledge (the secrets) transfer between individuals, in a way that doesn't generalise to teams? I'm asking because I've just been asked to build a research team ... (and one of my goals is to open all our results).
- bsder 7y ago
  The dirty secret of semiconductor manufacturing is that there is a LOT of cargo culting--so nobody knows what all the essential knobs are. This is true practically any time you have an extremely complicated process with lots of steps--repeatability is difficult--and it's not limited to semiconductors. It is exacerbated when the line starts making real money once it is up an running--nobody wants to touch anything for fear of breaking it. For example, chemical mechanical polishing has some basic principles, but the full recipe for the polish process is voodoo. What kind of pressure profile? What formula of slurry? How long? You can steal the "full formula" ... but then discover it doesn't work in your fab (this is typical). Why? Who knows? Is this wafer too thick? Is the layer too hard? Is this polishing machine somehow different? Perhaps the machine operator learned to tweak the "documented formula" under certain conditions? This is also why Intel makes a development fab and then stamps them out literally identically. That's what gives (gave?) Intel its absolutely insane yields. A classic problem in this was the formula for the spacing/aerogel material in US nuclear bombs. The factory shut down, but nobody really noticed until they ran out of material. By then the factory was long enough gone that a new one had to be built--and, of course, the new material was useless. They had to embark on a research quest to figure out what significant information had been overlooked. Another good example is injection molding lines. Lots of the time, when there is an injection molding problem the first solution is to lengthen the injection molding time by 10%. The people on that shift simply shrug and go on with life. That wasn't actually the problem (for example, maybe the incoming plastic pellets were too wet) but the people with a production quota don't care. It probably takes an old dude with a grey beard to grab a handful of plastic pellets and test them for water content, yell at the people who were supposed to prepare the plastic bits, and dial the speed back up to where it is supposed to be. That old dude is your institutional knowledge. If you don't have that grey beard, you simply lost 10% production capacity permanently. Have enough of those events and your injection molding company goes bankrupt.
  - jason0597 7y ago
    This is really interesting, I didn't know any of this. Do you work in this field professionally?