3 ms·

There's some reasonable demand for the lower density, more robust chips that were made in "paid off fabs". Largely, I've read, those fabs were turned off -- th

by cduzz 4y ago

There's some reasonable demand for the lower density, more robust chips that were made in "paid off fabs". Largely, I've read, those fabs were turned off -- they were in a legacy / sustaining engineering mode before covid. Lots of things, when you turn them off, for any reason, they're very difficult to turn back on; I suspect fabs are like this. So -- the age of $0.50 parts made in a fab that was state of the art in 1997 is over. We must make new parts, on new processes, that are substantially different from those original parts, or we must make a 1997 fab. If you can't source all the 1997 machine tools to make the 1997 fab, that fab is likely a $200 billion dollars to build the first one and many tens of billions for each added 1997 fab. So those $0.50 parts are likely going to be $80 parts for the first 8 years of that "1997" fab's lifecycle. Likely not going to happen.

daveguy 4y ago
The subtitle of the article is literally, "Fabs using older process nodes are the key."
- cduzz 4y ago
  Right -- that $0.15 chip is only possible to be made at the end of the lifecycle of a $10 billion dollar asset (the fab); that fab can only be made with a $500 billion dollar development to make all the supporting stuff. You can't make that $0.15 chip on a new fab partially because the chips made on a super tiny process are different in a whole bunch of different ways (operating voltages, temperature / environmental tolerances, etc). Maybe you can scrape together enough legacy parts from expired fabs to make some number of legacy "new" fabs, but even that's super tricky because just making the fab facility itself is hugely expensive and you can't fund it by selling the high margin parts that funded the 1997 fab from 1997 to 2004. The designs need to change to allow using the higher density nodes (redesign entire ecosystems of parts / products) or you need to accept that the $0.15 part is now a $20 part for the next 6 years or longer.
  - daveguy 4y ago
    But the entire article is not just about employing these old fabs, but about investing moderate amounts to increase the throughput of these old fabs. Compared to the large investments required for SOTA fabs.
deleted 4y ago
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by cduzz 4y ago

daveguy 4y ago

The subtitle of the article is literally, "Fabs using older process nodes are the key."

cduzz 4y ago
Right -- that $0.15 chip is only possible to be made at the end of the lifecycle of a $10 billion dollar asset (the fab); that fab can only be made with a $500 billion dollar development to make all the supporting stuff. You can't make that $0.15 chip on a new fab partially because the chips made on a super tiny process are different in a whole bunch of different ways (operating voltages, temperature / environmental tolerances, etc). Maybe you can scrape together enough legacy parts from expired fabs to make some number of legacy "new" fabs, but even that's super tricky because just making the fab facility itself is hugely expensive and you can't fund it by selling the high margin parts that funded the 1997 fab from 1997 to 2004. The designs need to change to allow using the higher density nodes (redesign entire ecosystems of parts / products) or you need to accept that the $0.15 part is now a $20 part for the next 6 years or longer.
- daveguy 4y ago
  But the entire article is not just about employing these old fabs, but about investing moderate amounts to increase the throughput of these old fabs. Compared to the large investments required for SOTA fabs.

deleted 4y ago

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