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Totally agreed, but if that one fab company falls over, much of the imaging industry has a problem. That's the monoculture.
by ISL 6y ago
Totally agreed, but if that one fab company falls over, much of the imaging industry has a problem. That's the monoculture.
- bayindirh 6y agoIn bigger semiconductor business we have three main fabs. Intel, TSMC, Global Foundries. Intel is closed to outside customers, so again we have a duopoly there. It's not very very different in the bigger picture if you ask me. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
- noobermin 6y agoTwo is better than one but more than two is better than both options.
- bayindirh 6y agoOf course. More fabs means more competition and better robustness across the industry. In a perfect world, It'd be nice for Nikon to build a fab with the lithography equipment they already produce.
- amarshall 6y agoIntel offers custom work https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.htm... You forgot Samsung as one of the big fabs.
- barkingcat 6y agoYes - Samsung is a gigantic fab.
- bayindirh 6y agoThanks for pointing out both. I was not aware of Intel and, I didn't realize that Samsung got that big. It occurred to me that Kingston probably has its own fab too.
- tooltalk 6y agoAlso, Glofo stopped developing cutting edge nodes (7nm or smaller) after AMD had ditched them a couple of years ago. It's now all but a two-horse race between TSMC and Samsung.
- to11mtm 6y agoYeah, but my guess is Kingston's fabs are primarily geared towards Memory (i.e. NAND Flash and RAM) (much like Micron). Memory is fairly easy to fab; in fact memory was one of the first things we saw Asian fabs rise up and overtake US/EU fabs on.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoThat’s a recent development. For most of their history they never did. AFAIK
- morcheeba 6y agoThere are lots of fabs, but not all specialize in techniques used for imagers (like backside illumination). I worked in LCOS and we had one vendor qualified that could produce a shinier metal layer -- something most fabs wouldn't care about, but directly affected our brightness & power consumption.
- starky 6y agoIt is even more tenuous than that. If just one of a company's fabs goes down much of the imaging industry will have problems. A few years ago when the earthquake affected Sony's Kumamoto sensor fab it caused some serious issues for some camera vendors. Nikon for example had announced their DL 1" sensor compact line to compete with Sony's 1" sensor cameras and reportedly due to the earthquake they delayed and eventually completely scrapped the project.
- killjoywashere 6y agoAre sensor fabs functionally similar enough to CPU fabs that if China tried to take back Taiwan, or just made it hard for Taiwan to ship chips to the West, the Japanese sensor fabs could retool for chips?
- sudosysgen 6y agoAbsolutely not. The lithographies, processes, and packages are completely different. Some sensors are still made on 300nm processes, useless for modern CPUs. 45 nm is considered cutting edge for imaging sensors, but would be a huge setback for computing. Intel, GlobalFoundries and even IBM fabs would be much better.
- makapuf 6y agoSure. But in th he grand scheme of things 45nm is intel core2quads Q9400. My main pc has this cpu and the only thing I miss is not enough ram.
- bayindirh 6y agoThe increase in CPU power doesn't become apparent until you start to use vectorization heavily or use your CPU for floating point-heavy scientific computing. Some of the code I've written can speed up 3x just by using newer SIMD instruction sets and bigger caches. It's unbelievable until you see it. I also manage HPC clusters, so we see strange effects when developers excessively hand-tune their code for a specific architecture.