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I know nothing about the chip-making process, and news about fabs and the chip industry confuse and scare me. Can anybody link me to a guide with the basics of

I know nothing about the chip-making process, and news about fabs and the chip industry confuse and scare me. Can anybody link me to a guide with the basics of these topics, like what exactly is a chip (is it a microcontroller? a part of a larger system?), or why the few giant fabs can't be replaced by a lot of smaller and cheaper ones?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
muricula 4y ago
There are two parts to making chips: architecture (design) and process (how it's manufactured). Intel does both but eg Apple only does design and outsources manufacturing to other companies. There are lots of different chips ranging from slow, energy efficient, and cheap microcontrollers, to fast, energy hungry, and expensive high performance computing clusters. Intel makes the fast ones, and had the fastest chips from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Since then, a Taiwanese company has had the fastest chips which go into iPhones, Nvidia graphics cards, and AMD cpus. Building a fab (manufacturing plant) to make the fastest chips which require features shorter than 7nm (billionths of a meter!) requires billions of dollars in up front investment. It's mass scale manufacturing at some of the lowest levels anything has ever been created at. The US gov't is afraid that company which makes the fastest chips in Taiwan (which is not recognized as an independent country, but is effectively self governing, but China claims is theirs, it's complicated yes), could be under Chinese control some day. The Military Industrial Complex don't want the US tech sector or US defense tech to be beholden to China, and US companies (Intel) want government funding to build expensive factories. Thus the CHIPS act.
passion__desire 4y ago
Asianometry[1] is a good channel for breaking down the chip industry news and process. He also has a newsletter[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos [2] https://asianometry.substack.com/ https://asianometry.substack.com/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

muricula 4y ago

There are two parts to making chips: architecture (design) and process (how it's manufactured). Intel does both but eg Apple only does design and outsources manufacturing to other companies. There are lots of different chips ranging from slow, energy efficient, and cheap microcontrollers, to fast, energy hungry, and expensive high performance computing clusters. Intel makes the fast ones, and had the fastest chips from the late 1990s to the mid 2010s. Since then, a Taiwanese company has had the fastest chips which go into iPhones, Nvidia graphics cards, and AMD cpus. Building a fab (manufacturing plant) to make the fastest chips which require features shorter than 7nm (billionths of a meter!) requires billions of dollars in up front investment. It's mass scale manufacturing at some of the lowest levels anything has ever been created at. The US gov't is afraid that company which makes the fastest chips in Taiwan (which is not recognized as an independent country, but is effectively self governing, but China claims is theirs, it's complicated yes), could be under Chinese control some day. The Military Industrial Complex don't want the US tech sector or US defense tech to be beholden to China, and US companies (Intel) want government funding to build expensive factories. Thus the CHIPS act.

passion__desire 4y ago

Asianometry[1] is a good channel for breaking down the chip industry news and process. He also has a newsletter[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos https://www.youtube.com/c/Asianometry/videos [2] https://asianometry.substack.com/ https://asianometry.substack.com/