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Question for those closer to fabrication. What workers are we talking about here? The image in my mind is of sealed rooms containing machines that move wafers

Question for those closer to fabrication. What workers are we talking about here? The image in my mind is of sealed rooms containing machines that move wafers around. Lots of machinery, few to zero people running the machines. Since what you want is repeatability and reliability, and we've worked out how to make machines do that. I can see said machines having maintenance schedules, where occasionally you need to turn them off and go and replace parts. Some of that is probably done by people, some by automated cycles. Are the workers needed people to carefully read maintenance manuals for machines built by someone else? Engineers to design and build new bespoke machinery (seems unlikely if these are copies of existing labs)? Fundamentally, how many skilled people that are going to be difficult to find does a state of the art semiconductor fab need. If we're talking six per lab, that's a very different problem to six thousand. (The article talks about technicians, says the US is missing about 60 thousand of them, and that it's a two year community college level of skill with some ideas for reducing that further. That sounds like a problem on the same tier as finding people to work in semi-automated amazon warehouses, i.e. basically fine)

sgarland 3y ago
I worked at Samsung’s fab in Austin for a few years, mid-2010s. Each section of tools (photo, etch, cleans, etc.) had somewhere between 20-80 technicians spread between four shifts. Mine, cleans, was I think the largest - we had about 20 techs per shift. Process, at the other end, had about 5 per shift. Each section also had N engineers, although most of them worked normal day shift hours. The fab was fully automated, in that someone would punch in an order, and many days or weeks later, wafers came out the other end. However, the machines to do all of this are incredibly touchy, prone to losing calibration, parts breaking, etc. They also require a ton of maintenance. The level of knowledge and skill to be an entry level tech is within reach for anyone who’s mechanically minded - we hired people whose only previous experience was auto mechanic. To progress to the Senior or Master tech level, though, you needed an intimate knowledge of multiple tools, to the point of having made improvements to them beyond what the manufacturer provided. I think the total number of techs in the fab was somewhere around a thousand, but I could be way off. I worked nights, so it was hard to get a sense of other shifts.
Supermancho 3y ago
When fabs were common, in 90's southern california, wafers were either cut or uncut and packed into boxes for shipping. Every now and then you would hear about the trucks getting robbed at the lab, usually from the pickup bay. Security started to tighten (although it didn't matter much against an organized group). 25 years later, the fabs are gone and the lessons are going to be learned all over again, I suspect.

sgarland 3y ago

I worked at Samsung’s fab in Austin for a few years, mid-2010s. Each section of tools (photo, etch, cleans, etc.) had somewhere between 20-80 technicians spread between four shifts. Mine, cleans, was I think the largest - we had about 20 techs per shift. Process, at the other end, had about 5 per shift. Each section also had N engineers, although most of them worked normal day shift hours. The fab was fully automated, in that someone would punch in an order, and many days or weeks later, wafers came out the other end. However, the machines to do all of this are incredibly touchy, prone to losing calibration, parts breaking, etc. They also require a ton of maintenance. The level of knowledge and skill to be an entry level tech is within reach for anyone who’s mechanically minded - we hired people whose only previous experience was auto mechanic. To progress to the Senior or Master tech level, though, you needed an intimate knowledge of multiple tools, to the point of having made improvements to them beyond what the manufacturer provided. I think the total number of techs in the fab was somewhere around a thousand, but I could be way off. I worked nights, so it was hard to get a sense of other shifts.

Supermancho 3y ago

When fabs were common, in 90's southern california, wafers were either cut or uncut and packed into boxes for shipping. Every now and then you would hear about the trucks getting robbed at the lab, usually from the pickup bay. Security started to tighten (although it didn't matter much against an organized group). 25 years later, the fabs are gone and the lessons are going to be learned all over again, I suspect.