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Chip supply chains are some of the most complex things humans have ever built and the amount of skilled work you need is crazy, so it really doesn't make much s

Chip supply chains are some of the most complex things humans have ever built and the amount of skilled work you need is crazy, so it really doesn't make much sense to put it anywhere else. In general also many East-Asian cities don't really suffer from dysfunction and lack of development so agglomeration really has a lot of upsides.

bobthepanda 4y ago
The cost of housing in Seoul is pretty dysfunctional, as is the general commuting crush: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339661 https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339...
bsaul 4y ago
do you have any good resources i could read on the subject of chip supply chain ? I know absolutely nothing about it
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  I wish I had ready-to-go URLs I could reference, but the complexity is just stunning. For example, the purity of the feed chemicals has been a key limitation, and steady improvements have been made by suppliers over decades. There are orgs that specialise in things such as shipping ultra pure chemicals in specially cleaned teflon containers. Just trucking and piping this stuff around must have had millions (billions?) of dollars of research sunk into it. You don't get to 99.9999% or better purity while pumping stuff into a dirty old diesel truck's rusty tank! The "tools" themselves are an extra level of crazy. For one, the ASML x-ray ("EUV") laser lithography machines are just an unbelievable piece of precision engineering. If twenty years ago you had told me that we'd have high-power x-ray lasers in an industrial setting with nanometer focusing precision I would have laughed in your face, or assumed that it's a function of a particle accelerator the size of a decent town. I remember seeing an add for a new-generation tool (machine) designed for the permanent vacuum part of the production line. They were proudly showing off their key improvement, which was that its MTBF was something like 7 hours. This was amazing apparently, because both them and their competition couldn't do much better than 40 minutes previously! Think about how demanding the requirements must be that a 40 minute MTBF was state of the art and totally acceptable in large-scale manufacturing, and raising that to "still less than a day" is worthy of advertising in an industry magazine!
- rdl 4y ago
  Asianometry youtube/substack/etc.

bobthepanda 4y ago

The cost of housing in Seoul is pretty dysfunctional, as is the general commuting crush: https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339661 https://m.koreatimes.co.kr/pages/article.amp.asp?newsIdx=339...

bsaul 4y ago

do you have any good resources i could read on the subject of chip supply chain ? I know absolutely nothing about it

jiggawatts 4y ago
I wish I had ready-to-go URLs I could reference, but the complexity is just stunning. For example, the purity of the feed chemicals has been a key limitation, and steady improvements have been made by suppliers over decades. There are orgs that specialise in things such as shipping ultra pure chemicals in specially cleaned teflon containers. Just trucking and piping this stuff around must have had millions (billions?) of dollars of research sunk into it. You don't get to 99.9999% or better purity while pumping stuff into a dirty old diesel truck's rusty tank! The "tools" themselves are an extra level of crazy. For one, the ASML x-ray ("EUV") laser lithography machines are just an unbelievable piece of precision engineering. If twenty years ago you had told me that we'd have high-power x-ray lasers in an industrial setting with nanometer focusing precision I would have laughed in your face, or assumed that it's a function of a particle accelerator the size of a decent town. I remember seeing an add for a new-generation tool (machine) designed for the permanent vacuum part of the production line. They were proudly showing off their key improvement, which was that its MTBF was something like 7 hours. This was amazing apparently, because both them and their competition couldn't do much better than 40 minutes previously! Think about how demanding the requirements must be that a 40 minute MTBF was state of the art and totally acceptable in large-scale manufacturing, and raising that to "still less than a day" is worthy of advertising in an industry magazine!
rdl 4y ago
Asianometry youtube/substack/etc.