5 ms·

These chips are still sent to Taiwan for packing, so it's a good step but not a complete step.

• m348e912 2y ago
  How does this make any financial sense?
  • _aavaa_ 2y ago
    This is how most modern supply chains look like. Plus, chips are small in size and cost a lot so you can fit a lot in a container. Per unit shipping costs probably come out to be pretty low. Especially when compared to the political costs and risks associated with not onshoring.
    • CPLX 2y ago
      > you can fit a lot in a container Guys these are microchips on wafers. You can put a million dollars worth in your jacket pocket. They aren't being shipped in containers.
  • arcticbull 2y ago
    Marine shipping is just about the most fuel efficient way of moving things between any two places, by a lot. A 100,000 dwt ship can get 1050 miles per gallon per ton of cargo. It takes about a teaspoon full of fuel to move an iPhone sized device across the pacific when I ran the numbers last.
    • Vt71fcAqt7 2y ago
      Interesting. Could you give a brief description of how you got that number? Eg. what factors were considered.
      • eric-hu 2y ago
        Those numbers match what comes up with a quick search: https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTotalFuelConsumption.htm https://www.extension.iastate.edu/grain/topics/EstimatesofTo... That study uses 1,043.4 mpg for the fuel economy of a 100,000 dwt ship. Videos of transportation ship engines are cool. Each cylinder is wide enough for a person to lay down inside it. https://youtu.be/G0eMyA388bE https://youtu.be/G0eMyA388bE
    • School-Cotton 2y ago
      To ship things to/from these fabs by sea you have to add the cost of shipping by truck between Phoenix and (presumably) LA. Not sure how big of a difference that makes.
      • nine_k 2y ago
        Chips are small, so one truck once a few days may suffice.
        • CPLX 2y ago
          Airplanes. They use airplanes. We are talking about microchips here, possibly the highest dollar per gram substance that exists on the planet. The interest you'd pay just losing a couple days in transit time would exceed the cost of purchasing a dedicated private jet and the crew to fly it.
        • jocaal 2y ago
          Imagine the insurance...
      • kstrauser 2y ago
        A semi truck carries +- 15 tons of cargo and gets an average of about 6 MPG, so about 90 MPG/ton.
      • ponty_rick 2y ago
        Trains are pretty efficient as well.
  • snakeyjake 2y ago
    The machines and processes needed to package the individual integrated circuits are fantastically expensive but the margins are so low in that step that it's only profitable at massive scales. So you put the fantastically expensive machines near where most of the customers are and most of the customers are in Asia. Works the same way with fiber optic cables. Making the long skinny bits is hard and high-margin. Actually turning them into cables is easy and low-margin. So Corning makes huge spools of fiber optic cable in Arizona, North Carolina, and New York (I think) and ships it off to Taiwan and China where it is made into the cables that you plug into stuff.
  • fblp 2y ago
    I'm suprised they can't ship (flat) packaging that could be used in Arizona with a simple assembly line. If they had that packaging design then for this to make financial sense the two way shipping (and loading, unloading, custom clearance etc) would have to be less than shipping the packaging, the setup cost per unit cost of putting the chip in a box
    • krisoft 2y ago
      Wait, wait. In the context of semiconductor manufacturing packaging does not mean what you think it means. It is not putting the product in a paper box. It is about cutting the wafer into individual chips, wire bonding the silicone to pins, and covering the whole thing with epoxy. Here is a video which explains it better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gg2eVVayA4 It would be indeed crazy if they would ship the ready chips to Taiwan just to be put in a paper box. basically the input of the process is a wafer which looks like this: https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Low-Anti-Reflective-Low-Defect-Ctg-on-silicon-Wafer-300x242.jpg.webp https://waferpro.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Patterned-Lo... And the output of the process is something which looks like this: https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_pad,dpr_2.625,f_auto,h_214,q_auto,w_380/c_pad,h_214,w_380/F1310270-01?pgw=1 https://res.cloudinary.com/rsc/image/upload/b_rgb:FFFFFF,c_p...
      • zeusk 2y ago
        The packaging in this context is not wire bonding but CoWoS - chip-wafer and wafer-wafer bonding.
        • krisoft 2y ago
          You are correct. I was just illustrating what kind of processes belong to the umbrella term "packaging" in the context of semiconductor manufacturing. Was not talking about what particular process are missing from the Arizona facility. But you are right on that it is CoWoS which is the missing ingredient.
      • fblp 2y ago
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • CPLX 2y ago
    These are literally microchips. Tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram. Shipping cost is fundamentally irrelevant, you can put $100MM worth on a direct flight and have room left over for your family and friends.
    • School-Cotton 2y ago
      Your overall point is probably right, but "tens of thousands of dollars of value in each gram" seems like an exaggeration. How much does one CPU weigh?
      • CPLX 2y ago
        Order of magnitude it's within range. A single wafer for something higher end is worth tens of thousands of dollars. So whatever that weighs. It's not much.
        • School-Cotton 2y ago
          But surely a wafer weighs more than a gram, no?
          • DougMerritt 2y ago
            Yes. One source I just double checked says that a 300mm silicon wafer weighs 840 grams, which seems to be in the right range anyway.
            • grues-dinner 2y ago
              I see that source too (universitywafer.com) which is sucked into the AI slop panel on Google. A 300mm wafer at 0.775mm thickness that weighs that much would be a density of 15g/cm³: midway between lead (11) and gold (19). Silicon is only 2.3g/cm³. A 300mm wafer should be much closer to 100g than 1kg. Another page (on the same website!) says 125g, which is pretty dead-on 2.3g/cm³.
      • 2y ago
• hollow-moe 2y ago
  what is involved in the packaging process ? I believe they don't ship fully assembled chips to Taiwan only to be put in a pretty box ?
  • jsheard 2y ago
    I believe packaging in this context means taking the raw silicon dies and assembling them into a package which can be soldered onto a PCB (or put in a socket, but Apple doesn't socket anything).
  • SSilver2k2 2y ago
    I'm making an educated guess but probably the cutting of chips from the wafers, placing them into the appropriate ceramic socket types (DIP, BFGA, SMD etc), soldering the line wires from chip to pin, encasing the chip, etc.
    • a1o 2y ago
      > DIP I am happily imagining opening a recent Apple device and seeing 74 gates with through holes in green PCBs, with an Apple logo made in soldering lead marking in the corner of the board.
  • virexene 2y ago
    I think "packaging" here refers to the process of putting the silicon die in its plastic casing and connecting the die's pad to the case's pins, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit_packaging
  • mechagodzilla 2y ago
    "Packaging" in this context means taking the wafer of compute die (made in Arizona), dicing it up into individual die, mounting it onto a silicon interposer (an even bigger die, no idea where that's made, but probably taiwan) along with a bunch of HBM die, then mounting that Si interposer on a somewhat larger, very fine-pitched circuit board ('substrate') that is essentially a breakout for power and high-speed I/O from the compute die. That thing is the packaged 'CoWoS' system, where CoWoS==Chip-on-wafer-on-substrate, that eventually gets attached to a 'normal' PCB.
• dgfitz 2y ago
  Until 2027, yes. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-reportedly-in-talks-with-nvidia-to-make-blackwell-gpus-in-arizona-blackwell-silicon-needs-to-be-shipped-back-to-taiwan-for-assembly https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/tsmc-is-repo... "TSMC does not have an advanced packaging facility in the U.S., and its partner Amkor will only start packaging chips in Arizona in 2027. As a result, Blackwell AI silicon produced in Arizona will need to be shipped back to Taiwan for final assembly, as all of TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity remains in Taiwan."
  • ttul 2y ago
    Given that there may be a 25% chance that China invades Taiwan by 2030, having the ability to package SOTA chips in the US by 2027 seems "soon enough".
    • coconut08 2y ago
      where did you get that number from
      • xeromal 2y ago
        There's a window where China will have it max capability to invade for the next few years. After that their population is going to start shrinking and every year will be harder than the next to invade.
        • bluGill 2y ago
          The population of 18-30 year old males is generally what matters for an invasion and China has been shrinking that for a long time. The rest of the population can plan the invasion, but they rarely actually do it. (a few countries also invite young females to an invasion, but that is not normal)
        • audunw 2y ago
          But they don’t have energy independence or food security yet, which is kind of a hard requirement for an invasion. There’s not enough rail lines and gas pipelines from Russia to feed them with significant quantities of fossil fuels. Imagine how bad Russias invasion of Ukraine would’ve been without energy independence and food security. The invasion of Taiwan is an order of magnitude more difficult, and Taiwan now has the recipe for how to knock out the entire naval fleet of a more powerful nation (see how Ukraine has essentially incapacitated Russia in the Black Sea).
• rich_sasha 2y ago
  What does "packaging" mean in this context? I'm a total n00b when it comes to chips. What comes to my mind is wrapping a piece of electronics in some bubble wrap and cardboard, which doesn't sound that hard...