4 ms·

Forgive my ignorant question, but if it's that sensitive why not automate it with robotics and vacuum seal it? I understand that this is a sensitive process bu

• itishappy 2y ago
  They do their best but they can't seal away everything. Raw materials have to enter, chips and waste come out, and the whole thing comes apart for maintenance. Manufacturing is a game of yields and margins. When you have thousands of operations and inputs, small changes have big effects. TSMC and Intel both have access to the same machines, it's what they're doing with them that differs.
• ok_computer 2y ago
  You have no idea how many steps, robotics, offsets, material feeds, alignments, tool setup, recipe fixing, materials troubleshooting go into a fab. These are all to run automated processes. You underestimate how difficult it is to sink heat in a vacuum and the cost of scaling volume and keeping pressure to a low exponent (high vacuum). Robot surgery is tolerant of a much greater length scale of defect than a modern IC chip and is orders of magnitude fewer process steps. Try to watch a youtube video or something but even then you won’t see the full picture. There are so many layers and the wafer passes through different flavors of the same processes over and over.