3 ms·

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

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 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.

ryanschneider 4y 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 4y 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 4y 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.