6 ms·

Here's what I learned working at Samsung: At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want

Here's what I learned working at Samsung: At the end of the day, the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools. You want your best possible champions to bring a design to bear. Then, the other 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. Software is the antithesis of this. The cost of playing around with your tools is not even worth accounting for. Due to certain cultural effects, you probably don't want to do software in semiconductor industry unless you really, really like the problem domain. Even if you don't get to play around with the billion dollar tools, you still get to help troubleshoot some of the most intensely complicated problems on earth. Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. Hard to package those 2 sentences up into a PR campaign for the young generation, but I'm sure we can spin it if the DoD can still find ways to recruit.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. That was also my experience working in the semi field (in Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is abusing you for your passion. Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people from this industry.
throwawaybbq1 3y ago
I'm a hobbyist in this area, and think the field is somewhat early in its development. MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the Arduino happened. Arduino may not have been the first to do exactly that but it was just good enough to cause an (re?)explosion in electronics as a hobby. During its hayday, I would say Arduino was a core element of the Maker movement. So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs). There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually open to the public, with the express mission of promoting hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a) it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational outcomes. They want workers with degrees. I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D Edit: Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment). If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable for semicon :D
- scrlk 3y ago
  https://developers.google.com/silicon https://developers.google.com/silicon might be of interest to you.
  - sweetjuly 3y ago
    I don't believe Google is sponsoring any more free shuttles. Your best bet nowadays is ponying up $10k to get a tiny chip on sky130 (so small you really can't hold even mildly complex in-order RISC-V cores). Sky130 is also generally so old that you can probably get better performance (let alone area) on a modern FPGA for a fraction of the price. Efabless's sky130 MPW is nice for semiconductor research insofar as it makes it more realistic to actually fab designs but it's not particularly useful for hobbyists beyond just the novelty of holding a chip you designed in your hands.
- lizknope 3y ago
  I'm a 25 year professional in the industry so I've never really thought of the hobbyist side. I use software from commercial Cadence and Synopsys that has a list price of over $1 million for a single physical design tool license and we use about 200 of those licenses simultaneously to tape out a chip. Then we spend about $30 million in mask costs. If we make a mistake it is another $20-30 million for new masks and another 4 months in the fab for a new chip. Google / SkyWater / eFabless have this program for 90/130nm chips. That is really old technology from the 2002-2006 time range but it is still useful for a lot of types of chips. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Google-expand-open-source-program-to-new-90nm-technology.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Googl... https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-enablement/mpw-programs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena... https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program I am curious what kind of hobbyist chips you want to make that can't be done in an FPGA? You can't do custom analog in an FPGA but these days you can find FPGAs with multiple PCIE / USB / HDMI serdes links, DAC, ADC, etc.
  - blihp 3y ago
    The problem with FPGA's isn't the hardware... it's quite complete and capable. It's the software stack you're forced to access most of them via that makes them a non-starter for many/most hobbyists. (cost is a major issue, but hardly the only one) My guess is that as low cost producers who have embraced the existing open source FPGA software being developed start producing higher end parts (more recent process nodes, large LUT count etc), that's when you'll really start to see them take off in the hobbyist world. I think the OP isn't even talking about 2006-level capability but rather something akin to 3D printing for semis that approached even early (i.e. somewhere in the 1960's-1980's range) level fab capability for hobbyists. Obviously it doesn't exist currently, but that's the dream for some.
lizknope 3y ago
I'm in digital physical design and part of that 99% of the army. The schedule is king. If we make a mistake it is another $30 million for mask costs and 4 months in the fab to get a new chip to test. Contrast with software where you can change 1 line of code and recompile and test in seconds. We do so much to minimize risk by reusing existing blocks, licensing third party IP that has already been validated in silicon, and armies of verification engineers.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Yeah but that speed also means we can go from idea to broad release quickly which both means quicker to market to deliver value but can also mean that a screw up scales quickly too.
- bombolo 3y ago
  > recompile and test in seconds i wish
  - ponector 3y ago
    And you don't need to compile in many cases..
  - junon 3y ago
    Compare that to the lead time of electronics, though. I just started in PCB design which is leagues more time forgiving than silicon design and fab, and even then if a non-generic component I'm designing for goes out of stock, the lead time for a new batch is anywhere from a month to a few years, on average around 4-6 months. Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions, all the way to fab and then market, we're probably talking years just to see a single design reach your test bench (I'm speculating). Oh and millions, because the major chip fabs only do things in large batches. Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in comparison. I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented out like it sounds like it will.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
sandworm101 3y ago
>> 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. That sounds like a mature and competitive field. I am suspicious of companies and fields where people aren't working like this. Look at the car industry, or energy, or farming, or shipping, or even aerospace. Only one of every thousand engineers at Boeing will ever decide the shape of an aircraft wing. The other 99% are there to implement and optimize its construction. Any company not spending 99% of its energies on optimization does not operate in a competitive environment and is therefore very likely on borrowed time. Eventually a competitor will appear or an IP monopoly expire and the easy times will be over.
- ip26 3y ago
  (Or it's a very young industry)
  - wernercd 3y ago
    In the grand scheme of things... in a universe that's billions of years old. Humanity is 200k+ years old. Civilization is 6k years old. Computers? 100 years old. What part of any "modern" industry isn't still very very young? even industries like construction that have been around for thousands of years are still relatively young. Computers and computing? infinitesimal.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Old by how close the industry's products are to physical limits. For example, the newest gas turbine designs are already exceeding 50% of the maximum theoretically possible efficiency as allowed by thermodynamics. So it doesn't matter how many thousands or millions more years gas turbines are optimized, by us, aliens, future descendants, etc... No future gas turbine industry in this universe can possibly double the thermodynamic efficiency of the finished product.
      - samstave 3y ago
phendrenad2 3y ago
I think it's simpler than that. Semiconductor manufacturing is such an advanced field, and there are so few openings for engineers, that they can be very selective in who they hire. We don't need to conclude that semiconductor engineering is particularly difficult, it's sufficient to conclude that they are simply picking people who will work lots of unpaid overtime, simply for the thrill of working in such a cutting-edge field.
jasmer 3y ago
You missed the part where they do it for a fraction of the salary. I suggest there's a kind of 'cultural imperative' in Korea that is so different from the US that it doesn't even begin to factor into our equations. My Korean grad school colleagues went to intern at Samsung for serf pay, the only way that could work is if there was some kind of culturally implied merit. The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc.. And that will be impossible without a fair number of migrants who will be mostly Asian - so where is this going to happen? Maybe they need a 'New South Valley' about 50Km south of San Jose, a cross between Orange County, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Seoul aka Cali, but slightly more formally regimented, a bit like the actual old-school Silicon Valley which was at the time, away from the buzz, a bit of a sleepy burb where people focused on hard stuff and economics mattered.
- bob1029 3y ago
  > The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc.. If someone like Netflix/HBO did a proper documentary with Samsung about their LSI fab in Texas, HR would have more applicants than they would know what to do with. This 'ethos' can be created. I saw what it could be like when I worked there. I really believe seeing the whole thing in action is the primary selling point. The draconian security makes sense once you walk that catwalk and witness with your own 2 eyeballs what is at stake. Capturing this sensation for the masses is the challenge.
  - jasmer 3y ago
    They don't pay enough is the point. Really smart and competent people don't work for 1/2 wages unless they are caught up in some kind of system like in Korea where it's a culturally backed norm and frankly they can't really escape. Americans will not work for fractional pay unless it's a kind of a 'wartime' / 'emergency' situation.
sweetjuly 3y ago
> the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.

ChuckNorris89 3y ago

>Solving these riddles is very rewarding and the experience will stick with you forever. That was also my experience working in the semi field (in Europe). People working there weren't in it for obscene compensation, they were into it for the hands on puzzle solving of uniquely complex HW problems with cool and rare expensive machinery. Some were quite significantly underpaid and while they knew it they never felt the need to complain too badly about it. I guess it's kind of like arts, which is a shame, because here some publicly traded corporation is abusing you for your passion. Also, the fact that most of Europe doesn't have many FAANGs and big SW companies paying orders of magnitude more to un-balance the jobs market, surely help to not discourage people from this industry.

throwawaybbq1 3y ago

I'm a hobbyist in this area, and think the field is somewhat early in its development. MCUs and cyber-physical systems was like this until the Arduino happened. Arduino may not have been the first to do exactly that but it was just good enough to cause an (re?)explosion in electronics as a hobby. During its hayday, I would say Arduino was a core element of the Maker movement. So what needs to happen to make this a reality for semi-con? First off, we need cheap, cheap fabrication. I actually looked at public funding in Canada and how that was going to the big name Universities who had their own in-house fab labs (at older process nodes). The costs of someone not in the inside was nuts. The actual cost should be in the 100s of dollars to fabricate a design (considering the marginal costs). There are people that do this at home but it doesn't work either due to chemicals being pretty dangerous and the need for a bunch of equipment. I bet the amount of money the EU spent on its first metaverse townhall (or whatever it was called .. the thing very few people attended) or a tiny fraction Canada wastes on silly things promoting youth culture or whatever, they could fund a lab that is actually open to the public, with the express mission of promoting hobbyists and education. This will NEVER happen because (a) it needs a professor who is on the inside with a kid-like passion in this tech and a commitment to bringing it to the masses (I see some profs like this at schools like MIT but it is so rare at large, competitive schools like the big ones in Canada), and (b) it does not have an instant payoff for the govt. They don't want dabblers and vague educational outcomes. They want workers with degrees. I am convinced before I am dead, advances in robotics and fabrication will simply the process (or use home equipment such as future laser printers for printing stencils). I'd love to spend my retirement fabricating my own CPUs :D Edit: Let me add: I don't mean the cutting edge process node. I mean the kind of process node that was used to make the very first chips (but less toxic, repeatable, cheaper equipment). If it is possible for synthetic biology, it must be doable for semicon :D

scrlk 3y ago
https://developers.google.com/silicon https://developers.google.com/silicon might be of interest to you.
- sweetjuly 3y ago
  I don't believe Google is sponsoring any more free shuttles. Your best bet nowadays is ponying up $10k to get a tiny chip on sky130 (so small you really can't hold even mildly complex in-order RISC-V cores). Sky130 is also generally so old that you can probably get better performance (let alone area) on a modern FPGA for a fraction of the price. Efabless's sky130 MPW is nice for semiconductor research insofar as it makes it more realistic to actually fab designs but it's not particularly useful for hobbyists beyond just the novelty of holding a chip you designed in your hands.
lizknope 3y ago
I'm a 25 year professional in the industry so I've never really thought of the hobbyist side. I use software from commercial Cadence and Synopsys that has a list price of over $1 million for a single physical design tool license and we use about 200 of those licenses simultaneously to tape out a chip. Then we spend about $30 million in mask costs. If we make a mistake it is another $20-30 million for new masks and another 4 months in the fab for a new chip. Google / SkyWater / eFabless have this program for 90/130nm chips. That is really old technology from the 2002-2006 time range but it is still useful for a lot of types of chips. https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Google-expand-open-source-program-to-new-90nm-technology.html https://opensource.googleblog.com/2022/07/SkyWater-and-Googl... https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-enablement/mpw-programs/ https://www.skywatertechnology.com/technology-and-design-ena... https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program https://efabless.com/open_shuttle_program I am curious what kind of hobbyist chips you want to make that can't be done in an FPGA? You can't do custom analog in an FPGA but these days you can find FPGAs with multiple PCIE / USB / HDMI serdes links, DAC, ADC, etc.
- blihp 3y ago
  The problem with FPGA's isn't the hardware... it's quite complete and capable. It's the software stack you're forced to access most of them via that makes them a non-starter for many/most hobbyists. (cost is a major issue, but hardly the only one) My guess is that as low cost producers who have embraced the existing open source FPGA software being developed start producing higher end parts (more recent process nodes, large LUT count etc), that's when you'll really start to see them take off in the hobbyist world. I think the OP isn't even talking about 2006-level capability but rather something akin to 3D printing for semis that approached even early (i.e. somewhere in the 1960's-1980's range) level fab capability for hobbyists. Obviously it doesn't exist currently, but that's the dream for some.

lizknope 3y ago

I'm in digital physical design and part of that 99% of the army. The schedule is king. If we make a mistake it is another $30 million for mask costs and 4 months in the fab to get a new chip to test. Contrast with software where you can change 1 line of code and recompile and test in seconds. We do so much to minimize risk by reusing existing blocks, licensing third party IP that has already been validated in silicon, and armies of verification engineers.

vlovich123 3y ago
Yeah but that speed also means we can go from idea to broad release quickly which both means quicker to market to deliver value but can also mean that a screw up scales quickly too.
bombolo 3y ago
> recompile and test in seconds i wish
- ponector 3y ago
  And you don't need to compile in many cases..
- junon 3y ago
  Compare that to the lead time of electronics, though. I just started in PCB design which is leagues more time forgiving than silicon design and fab, and even then if a non-generic component I'm designing for goes out of stock, the lead time for a new batch is anywhere from a month to a few years, on average around 4-6 months. Thinking about the design process, testing and revisions, all the way to fab and then market, we're probably talking years just to see a single design reach your test bench (I'm speculating). Oh and millions, because the major chip fabs only do things in large batches. Compare this to software. It is, indeed, seconds in comparison. I'd love for semiconductor fabrication to get fragmented out like it sounds like it will.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago

sandworm101 3y ago

>> 99% of the army is responsible for implementing the design in as repeatable & standardized a fashion as physically possible so that there is even the remotest chance of yield+profit. That sounds like a mature and competitive field. I am suspicious of companies and fields where people aren't working like this. Look at the car industry, or energy, or farming, or shipping, or even aerospace. Only one of every thousand engineers at Boeing will ever decide the shape of an aircraft wing. The other 99% are there to implement and optimize its construction. Any company not spending 99% of its energies on optimization does not operate in a competitive environment and is therefore very likely on borrowed time. Eventually a competitor will appear or an IP monopoly expire and the easy times will be over.

ip26 3y ago
(Or it's a very young industry)
- wernercd 3y ago
  In the grand scheme of things... in a universe that's billions of years old. Humanity is 200k+ years old. Civilization is 6k years old. Computers? 100 years old. What part of any "modern" industry isn't still very very young? even industries like construction that have been around for thousands of years are still relatively young. Computers and computing? infinitesimal.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    Old by how close the industry's products are to physical limits. For example, the newest gas turbine designs are already exceeding 50% of the maximum theoretically possible efficiency as allowed by thermodynamics. So it doesn't matter how many thousands or millions more years gas turbines are optimized, by us, aliens, future descendants, etc... No future gas turbine industry in this universe can possibly double the thermodynamic efficiency of the finished product.
    - samstave 3y ago

phendrenad2 3y ago

I think it's simpler than that. Semiconductor manufacturing is such an advanced field, and there are so few openings for engineers, that they can be very selective in who they hire. We don't need to conclude that semiconductor engineering is particularly difficult, it's sufficient to conclude that they are simply picking people who will work lots of unpaid overtime, simply for the thrill of working in such a cutting-edge field.

jasmer 3y ago

You missed the part where they do it for a fraction of the salary. I suggest there's a kind of 'cultural imperative' in Korea that is so different from the US that it doesn't even begin to factor into our equations. My Korean grad school colleagues went to intern at Samsung for serf pay, the only way that could work is if there was some kind of culturally implied merit. The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc.. And that will be impossible without a fair number of migrants who will be mostly Asian - so where is this going to happen? Maybe they need a 'New South Valley' about 50Km south of San Jose, a cross between Orange County, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, and Seoul aka Cali, but slightly more formally regimented, a bit like the actual old-school Silicon Valley which was at the time, away from the buzz, a bit of a sleepy burb where people focused on hard stuff and economics mattered.

bob1029 3y ago
> The US also needs a 'different kind of ethos' to compete in semiconductor, Cali Surfer Vibes won't cut it, neither will NY banker vibes, neither will SF Social Media AI Allbirds vibes, nor Cambridge High Intellectual Healthcare Conference vibes, nor Texas Energy Industry or DC Government Consultant etc.. If someone like Netflix/HBO did a proper documentary with Samsung about their LSI fab in Texas, HR would have more applicants than they would know what to do with. This 'ethos' can be created. I saw what it could be like when I worked there. I really believe seeing the whole thing in action is the primary selling point. The draconian security makes sense once you walk that catwalk and witness with your own 2 eyeballs what is at stake. Capturing this sensation for the masses is the challenge.
- jasmer 3y ago
  They don't pay enough is the point. Really smart and competent people don't work for 1/2 wages unless they are caught up in some kind of system like in Korea where it's a culturally backed norm and frankly they can't really escape. Americans will not work for fractional pay unless it's a kind of a 'wartime' / 'emergency' situation.

sweetjuly 3y ago

> the stakes are way too high to allow everyone a chance to play cowboy with the tools This is really what pushed me into just doing digital design as a hobby and making my money elsewhere. It's understandable that chips companies are so risk averse (a bad tapeout or, worse, a major escape can cost the company billions) but it is really a miserable experience to have so much passion and ambition but never being able to do anything other than extremely conservative incremental changes over a decades long career.