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Never having been an elite semiconductor person myself, I have only the dimmest intuition about the absurd science, technology, engineering, and mathematics tha
by benreesman 2y ago
Never having been an elite semiconductor person myself, I have only the dimmest intuition about the absurd science, technology, engineering, and mathematics that goes into it: but you hear these parts per trillion, measured in angstroms, quantum mechanics type units of account and it’s hard not to imagine it as some world apart.
I have a fond fantasy that those folks are laughing their asses off whenever we call the software stuff “high technology”.
- petre 2y agoThey're laughing their asses off when some CEO of an AI company comes out and asks investors for $7T for AI chips. Sure bro, here's 1/4 of the US GDP for your AI chips.
- bob1029 2y agoThe hard part of semiconductor manufacturing is all about the emergent complexity of many systems put together all at once. Any one tool can be isolated and dealt with by a finite team in a finite period of time. It's when you combine all of the tools and facilities together that you get this beast that has incomprehensible levels of complexity. Some people like to say that everything is harder in game development, but I'd say that it's even more so in semiconductor systems engineering. Tracing problems through every layer of the factory is like playing Elden Ring without a monitor. All you get is a guy in Korea who speaks very bad English to describe the scene for you. I can guarantee there is nowhere you will find more cursed problems. Imagine enduring a root cause analysis that winds up attributing a yield issue to fertilizer being spread on a field 20 miles away.
- hiddencost 2y agoKeep in mind they're also dealing with being potentially the only thing keeping China from invading Taiwan. So keeping their competitive advantage is very important to them.