4 ms·

Why did they fail?

peteradio 6y ago
For a contract to be mutually profitable it has to somehow be better than off-the-shelf. I got to imagine coordinating custom chip development is expensive for both parties.
ip26 6y ago
They are extremely secretive: One of the funniest stories I heard was about the first copy of the Intel 14nm design rules Altera got from Intel. They were heavily redacted, which is something I had never seen in the foundry business. https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-intel-discontinues-the-custom-foundry-business/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-... Additionally, a contract fab tries to be flexible, easier to design for. They make their libraries & design rules work well with commercial design software. A private fab on the other hand can boost yield & performance by pushing increasingly complex design rules on the design team, and the design team can use customized or internally developed software to make it all work. So in short, they had the best fab tech in the business but they weren't used to servicing anyone other than themselves.
- throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
  Surely 'themselves' is a huge enough market, and 'boost[ing] yield & performance' is exactly what they want to do, as the world's largest CPU maker? It sounds perfect. I guess maybe financially the extra perf etc. just wasn't worth it. (thanks for answer though)
  - ksec 6y ago
    There is no reason why you cant optimise for both. To simply put they wasn't ready to be a contract manufacture, and TSMC set the standard of what is expected to be a contract manufacture in the Fabs industry and Intel failed miserably to meet even the pass mark. Yes, it make perfect sense to optimise for you own yield and performance until TSMC overtake you and you no longer has the volume advantage. In manufacturing volume is everything. It is also worth pointing out Altera is actually a Subsidiary of Intel. If that is what they were going through you can imagine about the others.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      Maybe they do know how to optimize, but not exactly why anymore? I've seen a tv-documentary about 15 years ago about their fabs. Therein some reporter asked why there was a bend in some bundle of pipes for no apparent reason. They answered that was there because in another factory there was a column there which they had to route around, which didn't exist at this factory. They explained further to not wanting to risk process variation, by building that bundle of pipes straight again. Since then i have been unimpressed by all that high-tech, being so complex, having to cargo-cult around, instead of being able to understand it from first principles and build according to the situation. Not blindly copying something which worked at another place but doesn't apply anymore, because the place and its conditions changed.
      - prewett 6y ago
        I don't think it was cargo-culting in the case of that fab. A fab isn't like your mother's ham, which she cut in half because her mother cut it in half, only to find out that her mother had a small oven. A fab is like that tricky piece of code that has a comment on every line, but instead of one function it's 20,000 lines of that. On top of that, it takes several weeks before you know if your wafer came out okay. So when you duplicate your fab, the last thing you want to do is add more potential problems. Think of it like using a software library; you don't go rebuild the library each time you use it, you just copy it into your project. Sure, there's unnecessary piping, but you don't care. If you cared you'd write your own library in assembly language and it would be a shining example of efficiency and understanding. But maybe you just want to solve your problem and ship.
        LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        Yes, that way we got fragile bloat, eliminating all benefits of every new generation of hardware. Since the 70ies. How long will this model of 'value-added' innovation be sustainable, i wonder?
      - pkaye 6y ago
        I used to work in R&D for developing the machines used in the fabs. Sometimes the trivial details make a difference in the results and you don't always have to time to isolate and analyze each little thing. If you have a proven recipe, don't change it unless you have a reason.
  - ip26 6y ago
    Well, exactly, they are their own best customer. Contract fab was just a way to fill capacity in a lull period. So there was never a strong motivator to make sacrifices to build a great contract fab program.
- woadwarrior01 6y ago
  I guess the software analog of this is that the quality of code usually goes up when it’s open-sourced. Not just because of the contributions from outsiders, but because the original developers feel apprehensive about putting out low quality code.

Why did they fail?

For a contract to be mutually profitable it has to somehow be better than off-the-shelf. I got to imagine coordinating custom chip development is expensive for both parties.

ip26 6y ago

They are extremely secretive: One of the funniest stories I heard was about the first copy of the Intel 14nm design rules Altera got from Intel. They were heavily redacted, which is something I had never seen in the foundry business. https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-intel-discontinues-the-custom-foundry-business/ https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/7912-... Additionally, a contract fab tries to be flexible, easier to design for. They make their libraries & design rules work well with commercial design software. A private fab on the other hand can boost yield & performance by pushing increasingly complex design rules on the design team, and the design team can use customized or internally developed software to make it all work. So in short, they had the best fab tech in the business but they weren't used to servicing anyone other than themselves.

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
Surely 'themselves' is a huge enough market, and 'boost[ing] yield & performance' is exactly what they want to do, as the world's largest CPU maker? It sounds perfect. I guess maybe financially the extra perf etc. just wasn't worth it. (thanks for answer though)
- ksec 6y ago
  There is no reason why you cant optimise for both. To simply put they wasn't ready to be a contract manufacture, and TSMC set the standard of what is expected to be a contract manufacture in the Fabs industry and Intel failed miserably to meet even the pass mark. Yes, it make perfect sense to optimise for you own yield and performance until TSMC overtake you and you no longer has the volume advantage. In manufacturing volume is everything. It is also worth pointing out Altera is actually a Subsidiary of Intel. If that is what they were going through you can imagine about the others.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    Maybe they do know how to optimize, but not exactly why anymore? I've seen a tv-documentary about 15 years ago about their fabs. Therein some reporter asked why there was a bend in some bundle of pipes for no apparent reason. They answered that was there because in another factory there was a column there which they had to route around, which didn't exist at this factory. They explained further to not wanting to risk process variation, by building that bundle of pipes straight again. Since then i have been unimpressed by all that high-tech, being so complex, having to cargo-cult around, instead of being able to understand it from first principles and build according to the situation. Not blindly copying something which worked at another place but doesn't apply anymore, because the place and its conditions changed.
    - prewett 6y ago
      I don't think it was cargo-culting in the case of that fab. A fab isn't like your mother's ham, which she cut in half because her mother cut it in half, only to find out that her mother had a small oven. A fab is like that tricky piece of code that has a comment on every line, but instead of one function it's 20,000 lines of that. On top of that, it takes several weeks before you know if your wafer came out okay. So when you duplicate your fab, the last thing you want to do is add more potential problems. Think of it like using a software library; you don't go rebuild the library each time you use it, you just copy it into your project. Sure, there's unnecessary piping, but you don't care. If you cared you'd write your own library in assembly language and it would be a shining example of efficiency and understanding. But maybe you just want to solve your problem and ship.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        Yes, that way we got fragile bloat, eliminating all benefits of every new generation of hardware. Since the 70ies. How long will this model of 'value-added' innovation be sustainable, i wonder?
    - pkaye 6y ago
      I used to work in R&D for developing the machines used in the fabs. Sometimes the trivial details make a difference in the results and you don't always have to time to isolate and analyze each little thing. If you have a proven recipe, don't change it unless you have a reason.
- ip26 6y ago
  Well, exactly, they are their own best customer. Contract fab was just a way to fill capacity in a lull period. So there was never a strong motivator to make sacrifices to build a great contract fab program.
woadwarrior01 6y ago
I guess the software analog of this is that the quality of code usually goes up when it’s open-sourced. Not just because of the contributions from outsiders, but because the original developers feel apprehensive about putting out low quality code.