5 ms·

> Many chips are fabbed at 1 place only. The chip company owns the IP and has a defacto monopoly on the features of that chip, or even class of chips. If that f

by jabl 5y ago

> Many chips are fabbed at 1 place only. The chip company owns the IP and has a defacto monopoly on the features of that chip, or even class of chips. If that fab is shut down, no more are being produced and customers have to buy up what brokers can scrounge. The more warehouses get picked out, the higher the prices go. In one extreme example, a chip made at Infineon's Kulim fab in Malaysia, that sold for $0.47, was purchased for $100 @ by (ironically) a chip equipment company. Perhaps this is an opportunity for FOSS silicon? Everybody understands that currently FOSS tooling/PDK's/etc isn't up to the task of creating a cutting edge CPU on a leading edge fab process, which is the usual retort when somebody brings up FOSS silicon. But commodifying a sub-$1 chip? Yeah, why not?

thrown_22 5y ago
It's the tooling you're making that chip with, not the chip design. You can buy used equipment from a few nodes back for basically scrap value, but building that machine today would cost more than building it when it was new. You'd need to bootstrap a whole "old nodes" industry that does nothing but build obsolete machines to build obsolete chips once all the second/third/forth hand old node machines are gone. In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us.
- hughrr 5y ago
  I think in retrospect you can use the former eastern bloc as a metric for how this can go. They built a whole semiconductor industry from scratch and were never financially competitive. Parts were significantly more expensive and generally less reliable than the western made ones. You’d be doing the same as them but with less budget and fewer customers. The risk really is entirely that we single source parts. A few years back I designed something using only generic multi sourced parts and it was large and inferior. So there’s trade offs everywhere.
  - FeepingCreature 5y ago
    If you, for instance, only 3D printed plastic parts you could find in stores, you'd also find that your prints were generally significantly more expensive and less reliable. The upside is the ability to get anything you want at any time, as long as it's sufficiently far from the cutting edge, whether production setup for it exists or not. The point here would not be to replace traditional manufacturing but to augment it by acting as a backstop for total supply failure.
- pjc50 5y ago
  That's true, but given the original design collateral it would be easier to design a version that could be manufactured on present-day processes by re-doing the layout and timing than by starting from scratch. Still not free though. I think people underestimate how niche all the skills are here.
- jabl 5y ago
  Perhaps (re)bootstrapping the old nodes industry is exactly what's needed? So traditionally, the chip industry worked such that that the high-end products moved first to a new process node, and less demanding equipment was fabbed on equipment a couple of generations old before that equipment was thrown on the scrap heap. Rinse and repeat, everybody was moving towards smaller and smaller nodes, just that some could trail the leaders by a few years. But it seems these days the world is different, in that the cost per transistor has actually been going up for the leading edge processes, and power consumption has remained roughly flat. So for anything that doesn't need the latest gen process, there's really no upside to moving. Depending on who you ask, it seems the cheapest cost per transistor is somewhere in the 20-40nm ballpark. If so, it would imply there would be a long-time demand for these process nodes, and there is a need for an industry to supply tooling for these nodes, once the existing crop of second-hand equipment (left over when the leading edge users moved on to smaller nodes) is in need of replacement.
  - KptMarchewa 5y ago
    >cost per transistor has actually been going up for the leading edge processes Isn't this just because of overall chip shortage? We might see very different scenario if TSMC, Samsung and Intel overinvest now. Also, you could say that cost per transistor increased for older processes as well... >power consumption has remained roughly flat Any source for this? Anything I've saw contradict that.
    - jabl 5y ago
      > Isn't this just because of overall chip shortage? AFAIU, no. The basic problem, again AFAIU and I'm not an expert on this topic so take with a grain of salt, is that while the marginal cost of each transistor might still be less than at the previous generation, the R&D and capital costs have grown so immense that once you amortize those costs over the stuff produced for the lifetime of that process generation you end up with a higher per transistor cost compared to the previous generation. > Any source for this? Anything I've saw contradict that. Just search the web for articles about the breakdown of Dennard scaling, plenty of stuff to read on the topic. Even wikipedia mentions it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
- yourapostasy 5y ago
  > In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us. This is a really good description of what JIT does when no one considers economic reflexivity. The time duration for problems to surface is long enough that no one can "do the right thing" and last past next quarter's or next year's financial performance assessment (whether internally or by financial analysts). So everyone participates in a game theoretic sensible fashion, and gets burned either an SKU at a time as single source or limited source manufacturers burn out their legacy equipment, or all at once with black swans like this pandemic. I'm certain no one who modeled JIT in business school research has worked out if it was more cash efficient to put up with and pay the piper when (not if) the disruptions happen, or to JIT only specific items that meet supply robustness criteria. The purchasing people mania for single sourcing plays into this dynamic. Supply chain management is enormously complex, but I fear they're still way behind the eight ball as they find out it gets fractally more complex than they had bargained for when they set out to cost rationalize it all.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jopsen 5y ago
  > In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us. I guess that's fine as long as we keep climbing, right?

by jabl 5y ago

thrown_22 5y ago

It's the tooling you're making that chip with, not the chip design. You can buy used equipment from a few nodes back for basically scrap value, but building that machine today would cost more than building it when it was new. You'd need to bootstrap a whole "old nodes" industry that does nothing but build obsolete machines to build obsolete chips once all the second/third/forth hand old node machines are gone. In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us.

hughrr 5y ago
I think in retrospect you can use the former eastern bloc as a metric for how this can go. They built a whole semiconductor industry from scratch and were never financially competitive. Parts were significantly more expensive and generally less reliable than the western made ones. You’d be doing the same as them but with less budget and fewer customers. The risk really is entirely that we single source parts. A few years back I designed something using only generic multi sourced parts and it was large and inferior. So there’s trade offs everywhere.
- FeepingCreature 5y ago
  If you, for instance, only 3D printed plastic parts you could find in stores, you'd also find that your prints were generally significantly more expensive and less reliable. The upside is the ability to get anything you want at any time, as long as it's sufficiently far from the cutting edge, whether production setup for it exists or not. The point here would not be to replace traditional manufacturing but to augment it by acting as a backstop for total supply failure.
pjc50 5y ago
That's true, but given the original design collateral it would be easier to design a version that could be manufactured on present-day processes by re-doing the layout and timing than by starting from scratch. Still not free though. I think people underestimate how niche all the skills are here.
jabl 5y ago
Perhaps (re)bootstrapping the old nodes industry is exactly what's needed? So traditionally, the chip industry worked such that that the high-end products moved first to a new process node, and less demanding equipment was fabbed on equipment a couple of generations old before that equipment was thrown on the scrap heap. Rinse and repeat, everybody was moving towards smaller and smaller nodes, just that some could trail the leaders by a few years. But it seems these days the world is different, in that the cost per transistor has actually been going up for the leading edge processes, and power consumption has remained roughly flat. So for anything that doesn't need the latest gen process, there's really no upside to moving. Depending on who you ask, it seems the cheapest cost per transistor is somewhere in the 20-40nm ballpark. If so, it would imply there would be a long-time demand for these process nodes, and there is a need for an industry to supply tooling for these nodes, once the existing crop of second-hand equipment (left over when the leading edge users moved on to smaller nodes) is in need of replacement.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago
  >cost per transistor has actually been going up for the leading edge processes Isn't this just because of overall chip shortage? We might see very different scenario if TSMC, Samsung and Intel overinvest now. Also, you could say that cost per transistor increased for older processes as well... >power consumption has remained roughly flat Any source for this? Anything I've saw contradict that.
  - jabl 5y ago
    > Isn't this just because of overall chip shortage? AFAIU, no. The basic problem, again AFAIU and I'm not an expert on this topic so take with a grain of salt, is that while the marginal cost of each transistor might still be less than at the previous generation, the R&D and capital costs have grown so immense that once you amortize those costs over the stuff produced for the lifetime of that process generation you end up with a higher per transistor cost compared to the previous generation. > Any source for this? Anything I've saw contradict that. Just search the web for articles about the breakdown of Dennard scaling, plenty of stuff to read on the topic. Even wikipedia mentions it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
yourapostasy 5y ago
> In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us. This is a really good description of what JIT does when no one considers economic reflexivity. The time duration for problems to surface is long enough that no one can "do the right thing" and last past next quarter's or next year's financial performance assessment (whether internally or by financial analysts). So everyone participates in a game theoretic sensible fashion, and gets burned either an SKU at a time as single source or limited source manufacturers burn out their legacy equipment, or all at once with black swans like this pandemic. I'm certain no one who modeled JIT in business school research has worked out if it was more cash efficient to put up with and pay the piper when (not if) the disruptions happen, or to JIT only specific items that meet supply robustness criteria. The purchasing people mania for single sourcing plays into this dynamic. Supply chain management is enormously complex, but I fear they're still way behind the eight ball as they find out it gets fractally more complex than they had bargained for when they set out to cost rationalize it all.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jopsen 5y ago
> In short: we've climbed the ladder and set it on fire behind us. I guess that's fine as long as we keep climbing, right?