6 ms·

Semiconductor industry has the deepest and most complex value chain in the economy. TSMC has always been pure fab company and it pays off now. Samsung and Inte

Semiconductor industry has the deepest and most complex value chain in the economy. TSMC has always been pure fab company and it pays off now. Samsung and Intel are also in chip design business and do other things. They are less focused. TSMC's lead is not guaranteed. Any new technology node can fail and remove them from competition if they make wrong choices. I'm not exaggerating when I say that designing a new technology node for mass production is like a moon program. TSMC designs new node every few years, builds a fabs that cost 20+ billion. ASML machines are the most expensive tooling there but they are just part of the whole. Intel and Samsung are almost as good, but small differences have huge impact in the final result and timing. Small percentages in final yield can make a difference.

YourDadVPN 3y ago
What is a node in this context and what does designing a new node entail? Does this design process mean TSMC can do something with ASML machines that another company with the same machine couldn't do?
- Nokinside 3y ago
  https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
- rayiner 3y ago
  The important thing to understand is that at the level of chip manufacturing, you’re doing advanced materials science. These aren’t just abstract logic gates and structures built out of them, such as SRAMs. At the manufacturing level, the logic gates are nano-scale 3D structures made of different materials and in different shapes. For example, at this scale, the shape of the transistor gates has a big effect on performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_field-effect_transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_field-effect_transistor. That materials science is highly guarded secret sauce in companies like TSMC. NVIDIA and Apple will tell TSMC what logic gates go where (or often at an even higher level—specifying certain SRAM blocks going here or there). But TSMC has to actually build the nano-scale material structures that comprise those logic gates. The ASML machines perform the actual photolithography. They expose the die mask to the photoresist coated silicon wafer. Using that technique, you can built up complex 3D materials incorporating different layers and shapes. But the ASML machine doesn’t know how to make a transistor. It’s kind of like a 3D printer in that way.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    I like you 3d printing reference. You can have 2 people with the same printer trying to print the same part. What else goes into getting a good part? Proper bed leveling, bed heating, choice of material, part cooler, nozzle temperature, feed rate, speed, acceleration, layer thickness, infill pattern, and many other settings and choices. And that's just an off the shelf printer melting plastic...
    - ryanschneider 3y ago
      Ya this analogy really clicked with me. To really torture the analogy, Apple or any other TSMC customers hands them an .obj of their chip, and TSMC acts as the slicer and converts that into the GCode that ASML’s “printers” understand. And just like how some slicers have better overhang and infill algorithms TSMC has their own secret sauce for telling the ASML machines what to “print”. Does that expansion of the analogy work or did I just move the analogy further from the truth?
      - anon84873628 3y ago
        It's a good analogy but there's one more major aspect. The silicon wafer doesn't sit under a single "printer" the whole time. It has to be moved around between countless different machines all doing different specialized tasks. So there is a huge logistical challenge as well. It is like combining 3D printing with an international airline.
    - pen2l 3y ago
      This might be pedantic nit-picking, but: I think bed leveling/heating, nozzle temperature, choice of material, etc. are parameters that the printer manufacturer should have optimized (and, IME, good ones do). I think the end user's chief responsibility is slicing (infill patterns, layer thickness, etc. as you noted), indeed it is in this sense the end user can be said to be in the same position as Intel/Samsung, not so much the hardware maintenance but knowing the slicing tricks for getting complicated geometry to come out just right. For example, when you're making a cube, the sharp ends are places where bad things happen. When making sharp movements, the nozzle will tend to leave ugly trails and in other times cause warping. So here you can do a trick to save yourself: mouse-ears (extra material around the important edge, so that the bad artifacts happen instead on additionally-created non-core-geometry). At ground level, you use brims.
- chasil 3y ago
  The interview that I posted above discusses copper interconnects that IBM research introduced. TSMC had previously used a "spin-on" dialectic technique at a previous node, and reverted to CVD because of problems. They were able to beat all other manufacturers to market with copper interconnects (including IBM), because they avoided spin-on, which worked well in testing, but not in production. They had great luck in gaining this prior experience.
elteto 3y ago
A bit of an aside, but your comment made me realize how much we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. We (laymen) have no idea about the incredible complexity behind manufacturing a single CPU chip.
- hnfong 3y ago
  > we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. It's been like that for a while. That's why we need everyone else to function as a society. I've watched a couple blacksmithing videos on youtube but I still don't really know how smelting iron works, and I wouldn't be able to produce a steel if my life depended on it. That's literally 2500+ year old tech.
  - hexane360 3y ago
    What's even crazier is it's 2500+ year old tech that we turned into science in a period of about a hundred years (1860s-1960s).
    - mantas 3y ago
      More like labeled it as science.
      - xref 3y ago
        Kinda like all these “doctors” who just swaggered in and labeled brain surgery as science, we’ve been trepanning for thousands of years!
        mantas 3y ago
        It was science back then, it is science now. Using technologies at the time. 2000 years from now, some people will look at our era as barbarian and unscientific.
        deleted 3y ago
Freire_Herval 3y ago
>I'm not exaggerating when I say that designing a new technology node for mass production is like a moon program. It's insane. I had a friend tell me about what goes on in these asml machines. Essentially the targeting system that moves the wafer around cannot have any vibration so I kid you not the platform is floating and controlled by magnets. And this is just the etching machine.
- prewett 3y ago
  The etching process that uses a laser to blast a moving molten tin sphere to shape it so the next laser blast that vaporizes it produces parallel EUV light is pretty insane, too. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
  - nwellinghoff 3y ago
    Very cool video. Worth a watch
- Spooky23 3y ago
  I worked on a campus where they were building prototype manufacturing processes with these tools. The building those tools were housed in had a foundation that was iirc 30’ of a specialized concrete mix. I was chatting with some of the construction engineers over coffee and the consensus was that 10,000 years from now, some archeologists would be pondering wtf this giant concrete platform was for.

YourDadVPN 3y ago

What is a node in this context and what does designing a new node entail? Does this design process mean TSMC can do something with ASML machines that another company with the same machine couldn't do?

Nokinside 3y ago
https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
rayiner 3y ago
The important thing to understand is that at the level of chip manufacturing, you’re doing advanced materials science. These aren’t just abstract logic gates and structures built out of them, such as SRAMs. At the manufacturing level, the logic gates are nano-scale 3D structures made of different materials and in different shapes. For example, at this scale, the shape of the transistor gates has a big effect on performance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_field-effect_transistor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fin_field-effect_transistor. That materials science is highly guarded secret sauce in companies like TSMC. NVIDIA and Apple will tell TSMC what logic gates go where (or often at an even higher level—specifying certain SRAM blocks going here or there). But TSMC has to actually build the nano-scale material structures that comprise those logic gates. The ASML machines perform the actual photolithography. They expose the die mask to the photoresist coated silicon wafer. Using that technique, you can built up complex 3D materials incorporating different layers and shapes. But the ASML machine doesn’t know how to make a transistor. It’s kind of like a 3D printer in that way.
- phkahler 3y ago
  I like you 3d printing reference. You can have 2 people with the same printer trying to print the same part. What else goes into getting a good part? Proper bed leveling, bed heating, choice of material, part cooler, nozzle temperature, feed rate, speed, acceleration, layer thickness, infill pattern, and many other settings and choices. And that's just an off the shelf printer melting plastic...
  - ryanschneider 3y ago
    Ya this analogy really clicked with me. To really torture the analogy, Apple or any other TSMC customers hands them an .obj of their chip, and TSMC acts as the slicer and converts that into the GCode that ASML’s “printers” understand. And just like how some slicers have better overhang and infill algorithms TSMC has their own secret sauce for telling the ASML machines what to “print”. Does that expansion of the analogy work or did I just move the analogy further from the truth?
    - anon84873628 3y ago
      It's a good analogy but there's one more major aspect. The silicon wafer doesn't sit under a single "printer" the whole time. It has to be moved around between countless different machines all doing different specialized tasks. So there is a huge logistical challenge as well. It is like combining 3D printing with an international airline.
  - pen2l 3y ago
    This might be pedantic nit-picking, but: I think bed leveling/heating, nozzle temperature, choice of material, etc. are parameters that the printer manufacturer should have optimized (and, IME, good ones do). I think the end user's chief responsibility is slicing (infill patterns, layer thickness, etc. as you noted), indeed it is in this sense the end user can be said to be in the same position as Intel/Samsung, not so much the hardware maintenance but knowing the slicing tricks for getting complicated geometry to come out just right. For example, when you're making a cube, the sharp ends are places where bad things happen. When making sharp movements, the nozzle will tend to leave ugly trails and in other times cause warping. So here you can do a trick to save yourself: mouse-ears (extra material around the important edge, so that the bad artifacts happen instead on additionally-created non-core-geometry). At ground level, you use brims.
chasil 3y ago
The interview that I posted above discusses copper interconnects that IBM research introduced. TSMC had previously used a "spin-on" dialectic technique at a previous node, and reverted to CVD because of problems. They were able to beat all other manufacturers to market with copper interconnects (including IBM), because they avoided spin-on, which worked well in testing, but not in production. They had great luck in gaining this prior experience.

elteto 3y ago

A bit of an aside, but your comment made me realize how much we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. We (laymen) have no idea about the incredible complexity behind manufacturing a single CPU chip.

hnfong 3y ago
> we don’t know about the process used to create the technologies that underpin our civilization. It's been like that for a while. That's why we need everyone else to function as a society. I've watched a couple blacksmithing videos on youtube but I still don't really know how smelting iron works, and I wouldn't be able to produce a steel if my life depended on it. That's literally 2500+ year old tech.
- hexane360 3y ago
  What's even crazier is it's 2500+ year old tech that we turned into science in a period of about a hundred years (1860s-1960s).
  - mantas 3y ago
    More like labeled it as science.
    - xref 3y ago
      Kinda like all these “doctors” who just swaggered in and labeled brain surgery as science, we’ve been trepanning for thousands of years!
      - mantas 3y ago
        It was science back then, it is science now. Using technologies at the time. 2000 years from now, some people will look at our era as barbarian and unscientific.
      - deleted 3y ago

Freire_Herval 3y ago

>I'm not exaggerating when I say that designing a new technology node for mass production is like a moon program. It's insane. I had a friend tell me about what goes on in these asml machines. Essentially the targeting system that moves the wafer around cannot have any vibration so I kid you not the platform is floating and controlled by magnets. And this is just the etching machine.

prewett 3y ago
The etching process that uses a laser to blast a moving molten tin sphere to shape it so the next laser blast that vaporizes it produces parallel EUV light is pretty insane, too. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ge2RcvDlgw
- nwellinghoff 3y ago
  Very cool video. Worth a watch
Spooky23 3y ago
I worked on a campus where they were building prototype manufacturing processes with these tools. The building those tools were housed in had a foundation that was iirc 30’ of a specialized concrete mix. I was chatting with some of the construction engineers over coffee and the consensus was that 10,000 years from now, some archeologists would be pondering wtf this giant concrete platform was for.